Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Sign, Storage, Transmission) - Softcover

Eidsheim, Nina Sun

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822360616 ISBN 13: 9780822360612

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2015

Synopsis

In Sensing Sound Nina Sun Eidsheim offers a vibrational theory of music that radically re-envisions how we think about sound, music, and listening. Eidsheim shows how sound, music, and listening are dynamic and contextually dependent, rather than being fixed, knowable, and constant. She uses twenty-first-century operas by Juliana Snapper, Meredith Monk, Christopher Cerrone, and Alba Triana as case studies to challenge common assumptions about sound—such as air being the default medium through which it travels—and to demonstrate the importance a performance's location and reception play in its contingency. By theorizing the voice as an object of knowledge and rejecting the notion of an a priori definition of sound, Eidsheim releases the voice from a constraining set of fixed concepts and meanings. In Eidsheim's theory, music consists of aural, tactile, spatial, physical, material, and vibrational sensations. This expanded definition of music as manifested through material and personal relations suggests that we are all connected to each other in and through sound. Sensing Sound will appeal to readers interested in sound studies, new musicology, contemporary opera, and performance studies.

 

About this title

About the Author

Nina Sun Eidsheim is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sensing Sound

Singing & Listening as Vibrational Practice

By Nina Sun Eidsheim

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2015 Nina Sun Eidsheim
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-6061-2

Contents

Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1 MUSIC'S MATERIAL DEPENDENCY What Underwater Opera Can Tell Us about Odysseus's Ears, 
2 THE ACOUSTIC MEDIATION OF VOICE, SELF, AND OTHERS, 
3 MUSIC AS ACTION Singing Happens before Sound, 
4 ALL VOICE, ALL EARS From the Figure of Sound to the Practice of Music, 
5 MUSIC AS A VIBRATIONAL PRACTICE Singing and Listening as Everything and Nothing, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

MUSIC'S MATERIAL DEPENDENCY

What Underwater Opera Can Tell Us about Odysseus's Ears

In space, nobody can hear you scream. — ALIEN (1979)

Prelude

In 2007, I received an invitation to a recital that would take place in my bathroom. The Los Angeles–based soprano and performance artist Juliana Snapper, a soprano and performance artist who works in experimental music, offered to come to my home and present an underwater concert in my tub. "Crazy," I thought. "Why go to the trouble of singing in an element so far from ideal?" Why choose a setting that would conjure up clichés from the Homeric sirens to Disney's The Little Mermaid ? I declined the invitation, yet Snapper's endeavor lingered in my thoughts.

Introduction

Fundamental to Western notions of sound and music is the assumption that we can know and recognize musical parameters. Indeed, these notions form the basis of Western music's classical analytical practice and, as I suggest throughout this book, of the culture's quotidian "audile techniques," to evoke Jonathan Sterne's useful term. Even in contemporary works and studies, where traditional scores may not be relevant, dependence on sound waves, timelines, and algorithms maintains the traditional tendencies to quantify music. Consequently, an abstract yet fixed notation, or a notation-derived notion of sound, overshadows the actual, ever-shifting experience of music. In vocal studies, this orientation plays out as a privileging of dramatic, structural, and semiotic content derived from documents (libretto, score, and contemporaneous documents) and analyzed with attention to the sociohistorical context over the distinct quality or timbre of each individual voice in each performance of each work. Historically, Western music studies have favored the idealized and abstract at the expense of the sensible, unrepeatable experience.

The common conception of the voice as a generic vehicle for words, pitches, and durations arises from the same set of values. This notion results in the neglect of key vocal and sonic dimensions that, traditionally, are not notated. By considering the underwater singing practices of Snapper this chapter points the way toward those aspects of music that are inaccessible to standard notation but available to all of our perceiving senses. Snapper's work opens a window on the physical and sensory properties of singers' and listeners' bodies; on the spaces and materials in which sound disperses; and on these aspects' collective indispensability to singing and listening as lived experiences. Because sensory readings of singing and listening reach for dimensions of voice and sound that are difficult if not impossible to account for with conventional analytical methods, multisensory perspectives can enrich the analysis of musical sound in general, and vocal practices in particular.

P

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822360616
• ISBN 13: 9780822360612
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288