Author: Bonnie Gordon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226825159
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 429
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Book Description
An exploration of the castrato as a critical provocation to explore the relationships between sound, music, voice instrument, and machine. Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Constructed through surgical alteration and further modified by rigorous training, castrati inhabited human bodies that had been “mechanized” to produce sounds in ways that unmechanized bodies could not. The voices of these technologically enhanced singers, with their unique timbre, range, and strength, contributed to a dramatic expansion of musical vocabulary and prompted new ways of imagining sound, the body, and personhood. Connecting sometimes bizarre snippets of history, this multi-disciplinary book moves backward and forward in time, deliberately troubling the meaning of concepts like “technology” and “human.” Voice Machines attends to the ways that early modern encounters and inventions—including settler colonialism, emergent racialized worldviews, the printing press, gunpowder, and the telescope—participated in making castrati. In Bonnie Gordon’s revealing study, castrati serve as a critical provocation to ask questions about the voice, the limits of the body, and the stories historians tell.
Author: Roberto Pieraccini
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262016850
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
An examination of more than sixty years of successes and failures in developing technologies that allow computers to understand human spoken language. Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey famously featured HAL, a computer with the ability to hold lengthy conversations with his fellow space travelers. More than forty years later, we have advanced computer technology that Kubrick never imagined, but we do not have computers that talk and understand speech as HAL did. Is it a failure of our technology that we have not gotten much further than an automated voice that tells us to "say or press 1"? Or is there something fundamental in human language and speech that we do not yet understand deeply enough to be able to replicate in a computer? In The Voice in the Machine, Roberto Pieraccini examines six decades of work in science and technology to develop computers that can interact with humans using speech and the industry that has arisen around the quest for these technologies. He shows that although the computers today that understand speech may not have HAL's capacity for conversation, they have capabilities that make them usable in many applications today and are on a fast track of improvement and innovation. Pieraccini describes the evolution of speech recognition and speech understanding processes from waveform methods to artificial intelligence approaches to statistical learning and modeling of human speech based on a rigorous mathematical model--specifically, Hidden Markov Models (HMM). He details the development of dialog systems, the ability to produce speech, and the process of bringing talking machines to the market. Finally, he asks a question that only the future can answer: will we end up with HAL-like computers or something completely unexpected?
Author: Bob Edwards
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813134501
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
A National Public Radio veteran and a satellite radio pioneer discusses his influential life in radio.
Author: Bridget Sweet
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190916370
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
The changing adolescent voice counts among the most awkward of topics voice teachers and choir directors face. Adolescent voice students already find themselves at a volatile developmental time in their lives, and the stresses and possible embarrassments of unpredictable vocal capabilities make participation in voice-based music an especially fraught event. In this practical teaching guide, author Bridget Sweet encourages a holistic approach to female and male adolescent voice change. Sweet's approach takes full consideration of the body, brain, and auditory system; vocal anatomy and physiology in general, as well as during male and female voice change; and the impact of hormones on the adolescent voice, especially for female singers. Beyond the physical, it also addresses the emotional and psychological components: ideas of resolve and perseverance that are essential to adolescent navigation of voice change; and exploration of portrayals and stereotypes in pop culture that influence how people anticipate voice change experiences for teens and 'tweens, from The Brady Bunch to The Wonder Years to The Simpsons. As a whole, Teaching Outside the Voice Box encourages music educators to more effectively and compassionately assist students through this developmental experience.
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.
Author: Maureen Muldoon
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 132964722X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 108
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Book Description
Cathy Richardson and Maureen Muldoon are the perfect combination of heart and soul, music and story. Making Voice Box the best night of the month. Check out past shows on gigityTV.comIt's a story, a slam, a song, a serenade. A place to be heard and hear about the human condition. It's the old school front stoop, it's the modern day confessional.Where folks like us, who need to create and come out and connect go to spin and weave and unfurl. To encounter artistry and escape into inspiration. Where a song leads to a story and a story leads to a song and the beat goes on and out and up. Where your feet tap to the rhythm, your head nods in agreement, and your heart pounds in anticipation for the chance to share your voice.
Author: Pauline A. LeVen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009028391
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
Where does music come from? What kind of agency does a song have? What is at the root of musical pleasure? Can music die? These are some of the questions the Greeks and the Romans asked about music, song, and the soundscape within which they lived, and that this book examines. Focusing on mythical narratives of metamorphosis, it investigates the aesthetic and ontological questions raised by fantastic stories of musical origins. Each chapter opens with an ancient text devoted to a musical metamorphosis (of a girl into a bird, a nymph into an echo, men into cicadas, etc.) and reads that text as a meditation on an aesthetic and ontological question, in dialogue with 'contemporary' debates – contemporary with debates in the Greco-Roman culture that gave rise to the story, and with modern debates in the posthumanities about what it means to be a human animal enmeshed in a musicking environment.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 736
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Book Description
Author: Roshan Lal Raina, Iftikhaar Alam, Faizia Siddiqui
Publisher: Sanbun Publishers
ISBN: 9789380257181
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 104
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Book Description
In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.
