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Voice machines : the castrato, the cat piano, and other strange sounds / Bonnie Gordon.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Gordon, Bonnie, 1968- author.
- Series:
- Chicago scholarship online.
- Chicago scholarship online
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Castrati--Italy--History.
- Castrati.
- Castrati--History.
- Singing--Italy--History--16th century.
- Singing.
- Singing--Italy--History--17th century.
- Singing--Italy--History--18th century.
- Music and technology--Italy--History--17th century.
- Music and technology.
- Rome (Italy)--Civilization--17th century.
- Rome (Italy).
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (429 pages)
- Place of Publication:
- Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2024.
- Summary:
- 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.
- Contents:
- Prologue
- Sounds like ... : assembling the sound world. Orfobot : automated Orpheus ; the death of a cicada
- Feedback loops : entanglements of voices and instruments. Intermedio : the cat piano; Organoscope : telescoping sound; Organs and organs; Into the garden
- Roman reverb and sea changes. When in Rome : the castrato as a special effect; On the cusp; More than one sex
- Out of synch. Time travel/liquid ecstatics; Cyborg echoes
- Epilogue : cadential hauntings.
- Notes:
- Previously issued in print: 2023.
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Description based on print version record.
- Other Format:
- Print version: Gordon, Bonnie Voice Machines
- ISBN:
- 9780226825151
- OCLC:
- 1377816745
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