The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (Refiguring American Music) - Softcover

Eidsheim, Nina Sun

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822368684 ISBN 13: 9780822368687

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2019

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Nina Sun Eidsheim is Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice, also published by Duke University Press.

Review

“Voice is ‘a thick event’ in Nina Sun Eidsheim's pathbreaking study of race and vocality. Her visionary work challenges us to rethink and ultimately disassemble the long-standing, putative metrics for reading identity and the body in sonic cultures. The Race of Sound takes readers on an epistemological journey that boldly challenges us to question what we know about the wondrous vocal instrument. This is the book that scholars in feminist sound studies and black performance studies have been waiting for.” -- Daphne A. Brooks, author of, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0822368684
• ISBN 13: 9780822368687
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288