The race of sound : listening, timbre, and vocality in African American music /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Eidsheim, Nina Sun, 1975-
Imprint:	Durham : Duke University Press, 2019.
Description:	1 online resource (xiv, 268 pages) : illustrations
Language:	English
Series:	Refiguring American music
Subject:	Anderson, Marian, -- 1897-1993. Holiday, Billie, -- 1915-1959. Scott, Jimmy, -- 1925-2014. Anderson, Marian, -- 1897-1993. Holiday, Billie, -- 1915-1959. Scott, Jimmy, -- 1925-2014. Vocaloid (Computer file) African Americans -- Music -- Social aspects. Music and race -- United States. Voice culture -- Social aspects -- United States. Tone color (Music) -- Social aspects -- United States. Music -- Social aspects -- United States. Singing -- Social aspects -- United States. African Americans. Music and race. Music -- Social aspects. United States. Music. Music.
Format:	E-Resource Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/13359394

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9780822368564 0822368560 9780822368687 0822368684 1478090359 9781478090359
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:	Traces the ways in which sonic attributes that might seem natural, such as the voice and its qualities, are socially produced. The author illustrates how listeners measure race through sound and locate racial subjectivities in vocal timbre - the color or tone of a voice. The author 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, the author untangled 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.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments
Introduction. The Acousmatic Question: Who Is This?
1. Formal And Informal Pedagogies: Believing in Race, Teaching Race: Hearing Race
2. Phantom Genealogy: Sonic Blackness and the American Operatic Timbre
3. Familiarity As Strangeness: Jimmy Scott and the Question of Black Timbral Masculinity
4. Race As Zeros And Ones: Vocaloid Refused, Reimagined, and Repurposed
5. Bifurcated Listening: The Inimitable, Imitated Billie Holiday
6. Widening Rings Of Being: The Singer as Stylist and Technician
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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