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The race of sound : listening, timbre, and vocality in African American music / Nina Sun Eidsheim.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Eidsheim, Nina Sun, 1975- author.
- Series:
- Refiguring American music.
- Refiguring American music
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Anderson, Marian, 1897-1993.
- Anderson, Marian.
- Holiday, Billie, 1915-1959.
- Holiday, Billie.
- Scott, Jimmy, 1925-2014.
- Scott, Jimmy.
- Vocaloid (Computer file).
- African Americans--Music--Social aspects.
- African Americans.
- Music and race--United States.
- Music and race.
- Voice culture--Social aspects--United States.
- Voice culture.
- Tone color (Music)--Social aspects--United States.
- Tone color (Music).
- Music--Social aspects--United States.
- Music.
- Singing--Social aspects--United States.
- Singing.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (xiv, 268 pages).
- Place of Publication:
- Durham Duke University Press 2019
- Durham : Duke University Press, 2018.
- Language Note:
- English
- Summary:
- 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.
- Contents:
- Formal and informal pedagogies : believing in race, teaching race, hearing race
- Phantom genealogy : sonic Blackness and the American operatic timbre
- Familiarity as strangeness : Jimmy Scott and the question of Black timbral masculinity
- Race as zeros and ones : Vocaloid refused, reimagined, and repurposed
- Bifurcated listening : the inimitable, imitated Billie Holiday
- Widening rings of being : the singer as stylist and technician.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode
- Description based on print version record.
- ISBN:
- 9780822368687
- 9780822372646
- 0822372649
- OCLC:
- 1115104754
- Access Restriction:
- Unrestricted online access
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