The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music
- ISBN-10
- 0822372649
- ISBN-13
- 9780822372646
- Category
- Music
- Pages
- 288
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2018-12-06
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- Author
- Nina Sun Eidsheim
Description
In The Race of Sound Nina Sun Eidsheim traces the ways in which sonic attributes that might seem natural, such as the voice and its qualities, are socially produced. Eidsheim illustrates how listeners measure race through sound and locate racial subjectivities in vocal timbre—the color or tone of a voice. Eidsheim examines singers Marian Anderson, Billie Holiday, and Jimmy Scott as well as the vocal synthesis technology Vocaloid to show how listeners carry a series of assumptions about the nature of the voice and to whom it belongs. Outlining how the voice is linked to ideas of racial essentialism and authenticity, Eidsheim untangles the relationship between race, gender, vocal technique, and timbre while addressing an undertheorized space of racial and ethnic performance. In so doing, she advances our knowledge of the cultural-historical formation of the timbral politics of difference and the ways that comprehending voice remains central to understanding human experience, all the while advocating for a form of listening that would allow us to hear singers in a self-reflexive, denaturalized way.
Get the book
Similar books
-
Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature
By Nicole Brittingham FurlongeDrawing from a multimedia archive, Furlonge examines how many of the texts call on readers to "listen in print.
-
Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop
By Guthrie P. Ramseybrother , Elder Willie James Campbell , pastored St. James ; he had inherited this responsibility following the untimely death of their father , who had founded the church decades earlier . Elder Campbell's nephew manned the B - 3 ...
-
The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening
By Jennifer Lynn StoeverFollowing The Conjure Woman's publication, Booker T. Washington urged Chesnutt to seize the golden opportunity to create sympathy throughout the country for our cause through the medium of fiction. Joel Chandler Harris [white author of ...
-
Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America
By Josh KunEdwards, Norval. “Roots and Some Routes Not Taken: A Caribcentric Reading of the Black Atlantic.” Found Object, no. 4 (Fall 1994). Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard, ed. People of the Body. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.
-
Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice
By Nina Sun EidsheimIn Sensing Sound Nina Sun Eidsheim offers a vibrational theory of music that radically re-envisions how we think about sound, music, and listening.
-
Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans
By Charles B. HerschThis volume shows how musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Nick La Rocca, and Louis Armstrong negotiated New Orleans’s complex racial rules to pursue their craft and how, in order to widen their audiences, they became fluent in a variety ...
-
Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production
By Anthony ReedIn Soundworks Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work.
-
Race, Rock, and Elvis
By Michael T. BertrandGenovese , Eugene . The Political Economy of Slavery : Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South . 4th ed . New York : Vintage Books , 1967 . " Rather Be a Nigger than a Poor White Man ' : Slave Perceptions of Southern ...
-
Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles
By Gaye Theresa JohnsonWang, Oliver. “The Journey of “Viva Tirado”: A Musical Conversation within Afro-Chicano Los Angeles.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 22, no. 4 (2010): 348–366. Weiss, Jeff. “Remembering Rodger 'Uncle Jamm' Clayton, Early L.A. Rap ...
-
Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow
By Karl Hagstrom MillerHe unsuccessfully courted singers in the Howard Burlesque Company and the Primrose and West Minstrels, before he persuaded prima donna Annie Whitney of Clark's Burlesquers to give the song a try. May Irwin heard Whitney sing it and ...