Singing the Body Electric: The Human Voice and Sound Technology

Singing the Body Electric: The Human Voice and Sound Technology PDF Author: Miriama Young
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317054857
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Singing the Body Electric explores the relationship between the human voice and technology, offering startling insights into the ways in which technological mediation affects our understanding of the voice, and more generally, the human body. From the phonautograph to magnetic tape and now to digital sampling, Miriama Young visits particular musical and literary works that define a century-and-a-half of recorded sound. She discusses the way in which the human voice is captured, transformed or synthesised through technology. This includes the sampled voice, the mechanical voice, the technologically modified voice, the pliable voice of the digital era, and the phenomenon by which humans mimic the sounding traits of the machine. The book draws from key electro-vocal works spanning a range of genres - from Luciano Berio's Thema: Omaggio a Joyce to Radiohead, from Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room, to Björk, and from Pierre Henry's Variations on a Door and a Sigh to Christian Marclay's Maria Callas. In essence, this book transcends time and musical style to reflect on the way in which the machine transforms our experience of the voice. The chapters are interpolated by conversations with five composers who work creatively with the voice and technology: Trevor Wishart, Katharine Norman, Paul Lansky, Eduardo Miranda and Bora Yoon. This book is an interdisciplinary enterprise that combines music aesthetics and musical analysis with literature and philosophy.

Singing the Body Electric: The Human Voice and Sound Technology

Singing the Body Electric: The Human Voice and Sound Technology PDF Author: Miriama Young
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317054857
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
Singing the Body Electric explores the relationship between the human voice and technology, offering startling insights into the ways in which technological mediation affects our understanding of the voice, and more generally, the human body. From the phonautograph to magnetic tape and now to digital sampling, Miriama Young visits particular musical and literary works that define a century-and-a-half of recorded sound. She discusses the way in which the human voice is captured, transformed or synthesised through technology. This includes the sampled voice, the mechanical voice, the technologically modified voice, the pliable voice of the digital era, and the phenomenon by which humans mimic the sounding traits of the machine. The book draws from key electro-vocal works spanning a range of genres - from Luciano Berio's Thema: Omaggio a Joyce to Radiohead, from Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room, to Björk, and from Pierre Henry's Variations on a Door and a Sigh to Christian Marclay's Maria Callas. In essence, this book transcends time and musical style to reflect on the way in which the machine transforms our experience of the voice. The chapters are interpolated by conversations with five composers who work creatively with the voice and technology: Trevor Wishart, Katharine Norman, Paul Lansky, Eduardo Miranda and Bora Yoon. This book is an interdisciplinary enterprise that combines music aesthetics and musical analysis with literature and philosophy.

Vincenzo Bellini on Stage and Screen, 1935-2020

Vincenzo Bellini on Stage and Screen, 1935-2020 PDF Author: Emilio Sala
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501391208
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Vincenzo Bellini on Stage and Screen, 1935–2020 offers nine case studies of the history of Vincenzo Bellini's operas on stage, on screen, and in sound, video and performance art. This investigation begins in 1935, the hundredth anniversary of the composer's death and the year when his first biopic was released, and ends in 2020, when performance artist Marina Abramovic's 'opera project' 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, whose final scene is accompanied by Bellini's famous aria 'Casta Diva,' was premiered. In Part One, several recent productions of La sonnambula, Norma and I Puritani are discussed from different perspectives, but the common focus is on the possible meanings of these works for contemporary spectators. Part Two, centered on cinema, includes chapters on biopics of Bellini that make extensive use of his music, as well as on the presence of this music in soundtracks of films from the last half century. Part Three turns to other media or mixtures of stage and screen, and focuses on Bellini in sound and video art of the last few decades, on YouTube and its fandom, and on 7 Deaths of Maria Callas. The volume offers an expansive view of the many ways in which Bellini's operas have been visualized and conceptualized over the past century, and of what they may have meant, and may still mean, for twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture.

Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama

Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama PDF Author: Jelena Novak
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317145380
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s most celebrated collaboration, the landmark opera Einstein on the Beach, had its premiere at the Avignon Festival in 1976. During its initial European tour, Metropolitan Opera premiere, and revivals in 1984 and 1992, Einstein provoked opposed reactions from both audiences and critics. Today, Einstein is well on the way itself to becoming a canonized avant-garde work, and it is widely acknowledged as a profoundly significant moment in the history of opera or musical theater. Einstein created waves that for many years crashed against the shores of traditional thinking concerning the nature and creative potential of audiovisual expression. Reaching beyond opera, its influence was felt in audiovisual culture in general: in contemporary avant-garde music, performance art, avant-garde cinema, popular film, popular music, advertising, dance, theater, and many other expressive, commercial, and cultural spheres. Inspired by the 2012–2015 series of performances that re-contextualized this unique work as part of the present-day nexus of theoretical, political, and social concerns, the editors and contributors of this book take these new performances as a pretext for far-reaching interdisciplinary reflection and dialogue. Essays range from those that focus on the human scale and agencies involved in productions to the mechanical and post-human character of the opera’s expressive substance. A further valuable dimension is the inclusion of material taken from several recent interviews with creative collaborators Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, and Lucinda Childs, each of these sections comprising knee plays, or short intermezzo sections resembling those found in the opera Einstein on the Beach itself. The book additionally features a foreword written by the influential musicologist and cultural theorist Susan McClary and an interview with film and theater luminary Peter Greenaway, as well as a short chapter of reminiscences written by the singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega.

The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art

The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art PDF Author: Jane Grant
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190274050
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 625

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art surveys the practices, politics, and emerging frameworks of thought that now define the artistic practice of sound art.

The Relentless Pursuit of Tone

The Relentless Pursuit of Tone PDF Author: Robert Fink
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190908017
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music assembles a broad spectrum of contemporary perspectives on how "sound" functions in an equally wide array of popular music. Ranging from the twang of country banjoes and the sheen of hip-hop strings to the crunch of amplified guitars and the thump of subwoofers on the dance floor, this volume bridges the gap between timbre, our name for the purely acoustic characteristics of sound waves, and tone, an emergent musical construct that straddles the borderline between the perceptual and the political. Essays engage with the entire history of popular music as recorded sound, from the 1930s to the present day, under four large categories. "Genre" asks how sonic signatures define musical identities and publics; "Voice" considers the most naturalized musical instrument, the human voice, as racial and gendered signifier, as property or likeness, and as raw material for algorithmic perfection through software; "Instrument" tells stories of the way some iconic pop music machines-guitars, strings, synthesizers-got (or lost) their distinctive sounds; "Production" then puts it all together, asking structural questions about what happens in a recording studio, what is produced (sonic cartoons? rockist authenticity? empty space?) and what it all might mean.

The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies

The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies PDF Author: Nina Eidsheim
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199982309
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
More than 200 years after the first speaking machine, we are accustomed to voices that speak from any- and everywhere. We interact daily with voices that emit from house alarm systems, cars, telephones, and digital assistants, such as Alexa and Google Home. However, vocal events still have the capacity to raise age-old questions about the human, the animal, the machine, and the spiritual-or in non-metaphysical terms-questions about identity and authenticity. In The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, contributors look to the metaphorical voice as well as the clinical understanding of the vocal apparatus to answer the seemingly innocuous question: What is voice? From a range of disciplines including the humanities, biology, culture, and technology studies, contributors draw on the unique methodologies and values each has at hand to address the uses, meanings, practices, theories, methods, and sounds of the voice. Together, they assess the ways that discipline-specific, ontological, and epistemological assumptions of voice need to shift in order to take the findings of other fields into account. This Handbook thus enables a lively discussion as multifaceted and complex as the voice itself has proven to be.

Contemporary Opera in Flux

Contemporary Opera in Flux PDF Author: Yayoi U Everett
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472903586
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
In twelve essays, Contemporary Opera in Flux discusses a series of shifts that, taken together, have radically redefined the production and reception of opera. Focusing on productions involving late twentieth- and twenty-first century scores and libretti, the contributors draw on conversations with members of creative teams and studies of archival material, dipping into a historical record that remains in flux as composers, librettists, directors, and designers revisit existing work and create anew. The contributors to this volume push the boundaries of contemporary opera scholarship by examining works that disrupt operatic conventions; tackle sociopolitical issues such as drug trafficking, racial injustice, and cultural trauma; and advance underrepresented works by female, African-American, Asian, and avant-garde composers around the globe. Contemporary Opera in Flux bridges the gaps between expanding literature on opera, theater, new music, postmodern dramaturgy, and posthuman aesthetics, while also confronting larger questions of identity, representation, and narrative agency that are at the forefront of contemporary music scholarship. This collection of essays engages critically with the past out of a conviction that, amid general public perceptions of opera as anachronistic or elitist, contemporary opera has emerged as an artistic incubator for experimentation.

A Blaze of Light in Every Word

A Blaze of Light in Every Word PDF Author: Victoria Malawey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190052228
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
The human singing voice holds immense power - to convey mood, emotion, and identity in songs, provide music's undeniable "wow" moments, and communicate a pop song's meaning perhaps more than any other musical parameter. And unlike the other aspects of musical content - like harmony, form, melody, and rhythm, for which generations of scholars have formed sophisticated analyses - scholarly approaches to vocal delivery remain grossly underdeveloped. An exciting and much-needed new approach, A Blaze of Light in Every Word presents a systematic and encompassing conceptual model for analyzing vocal delivery. Author Victoria Malawey focuses on three overlapping areas of inquiry - pitch, prosody, and quality - while drawing on research from music theory and pedagogy as well as gender studies and philosophy to situates the sonic and material aspects of vocal delivery among broader cultural, philosophical, and anthropological approaches to voice. Malawey develops a much-needed and innovative set of analytical tools through in-depth analyses of popular song recordings in genres spanning from hip hop to death metal. A Blaze of Light in Every Word brings new clarity to the relationship between the voice's sonic content and its greater signification, helping us understand the complexity and uniqueness of singing voices.

Voice as Art

Voice as Art PDF Author: Richard Couzins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000578127
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Voice as Art considers how artists have used human voices since they became reproducible and entered art discourse in the twentieth century. The discussion embeds artworks using voices within historical and theoretical contexts in a comparative overview arguing that reproduction caused increased creativity moving from acting to creating phonic materials framed by phenomenological deep listening by early video and performance to the plurality and sampling of postmodernism and the multiple angles of contemporary forensic listening. This change is an example of how artistic practice reveals the ideologies of listening. Using a range of examples from Hugo Ball, Martha Rosler, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Janet Cardiff and Mike Kelley through to contemporary practice by Shilpa Gupta, The Otolith Group and Elizabeth Price, the voice is tracked through modernism and postmodernism to posthumanism in relation to speaking subjects, sculptural objects, documents, dramaturgical utterance, forensic evidence, verbatim techniques and embodied listening. This book gives artists, researchers and art audiences ways to understand how voices exist in between theoretical discourses, and how with their utterances, artists create new dispositions in space by reworking genres to critique cultural form and meaning. This book will be of great interest to students and practitioners of sound art, visual culture and theatre and performance.

The Evolution of Music Through Culture and Science

The Evolution of Music Through Culture and Science PDF Author: Peter Townsend
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198848404
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
The Evolution of Music by Culture and Science aims to recognise the impact of science on music, why it occurs, how we respond, and even to tentatively see if we can predict future developments. Technology has played an immense role in the development of music as it has enabled the production of new sounds, introduced new instruments and continuously improved and modified existing ones. Printing, musical notation, and modern computer aids to composition, plus recordings and electronic transmission have equally enabled us to have access to music from across the world. Such changes, whether just more powerful pianos, or new sounds as from the saxophone, have inspired composers and audiences alike. Acoustics and architecture play similar roles as they changed the scale and performance of concert halls, and with the advent of electronics, they enabled vast pop music festivals. No aspect of modern music making has been untouched by the synergy with scientific innovation. This is not a one-way interaction as the early attempts to make recordings were a major motivating force to design the electronics for amplifiers and these in turn inspired and enabled the designs of semiconductor electronics and modern computer technology. To appreciate the impact of technology on music does not require any prior scientific background as the concepts are invariably extremely simple and are presented here without technical detail. Understanding music and why we like different genres is far more complex, as this involves our personal background and taste. Both aspects change with time, and there is no contradiction in enjoying items as diverse as baroque madrigals, symphonies, jazz or pop music, or music from totally different cultures.