More than 200 years after the first speaking machine, we are accustomed to voices that speak from any- and everywhere. We interact daily with voices that emit from house alarm systems, cars, telephones, and digital assistants, such as Alexa and Google Home. However, vocal events still have the capacity to raise age-old questions about the human, the animal, the machine, and the spiritual-or in non-metaphysical terms-questions about identity and authenticity. In The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, contributors look to the metaphorical voice as well as the clinical understanding of the vocal apparatus to answer the seemingly innocuous question: What is voice? From a range of disciplines including the humanities, biology, culture, and technology studies, contributors draw on the unique methodologies and values each has at hand to address the uses, meanings, practices, theories, methods, and sounds of the voice. Together, they assess the ways that discipline-specific, ontological, and epistemological assumptions of voice need to shift in order to take the findings of other fields into account. This Handbook thus enables a lively discussion as multifaceted and complex as the voice itself has proven to be.
Introduction Nina Sun Eidsheim and Katherine Meizel I. Framing Voice: Voice as a Carrier of Meaning Frontispiece. What is Voice? Yoko Ono (with Juliette Bellocq and Jessica Fleischmann, graphic design) 1. What Was the Voice? Shane Butler 2. Object, Person, Machine, or What: Practical Ontologies of Voice Matt Rahaim 3. Singing High: Black Countertenors and Gendered Sound in Gospel Performance Alisha Lola Jones II. Changing Voice: Voice as Barometer 4. Medical Care of Voice Disorders Robert T. Sataloff and Mary J. Hawkshaw 5. Fluid Voices: Processes and Practices in Singing Impersonation Katherine Meizel and Ronald C. Scherer 6. This American Voice: The Odd Timbre of a New Standard in Public Radio Tom McEnaney 7. The Voice of Feeling: Liberal Subjects, Music, and the Cinematic Speech Dan Wang III. Active Voice: Voice as Politics 8. Trans/forming White Noise: Gender, Race, and Dis/ability in the Music of Joe Stevens Elias Krell 9. Voice in Charismatic Leadership Rosario Signorello 10. Challenging Voices: Re-Listening to Marshallese Histories of the Present Jessica A. Schwartz and April L. Brown 11. Voice Dipped in Black: The Louisville Project and the Birth of Black Radical Argument in College Debate Policy Shanara R. Reid-Brinkley IV. Sensing Voice: Voice as (Multi-)Sensory Phenomenon 12. Voiceness in Musical Instruments Cornelia Fales 13. The Evolution of Voice Perception Katarzyna Pisanski and Gregory A. Bryant 14. Acoustic Slits and Vocal Incongruences in Los Angeles Union Station Nina Sun Eidsheim 15. Tuning a Throat Song in Inner Asia: On the Nature of Vocal Gifts with People's Xöömeizhi of the Tyva Republic Valeriy Mongush (b. 1953) Robert O. Beahrs V. Producing Voice: Vocal Modalities 16. The Echoing Palimpsest: Singing and the Experience of Time at the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople Alexander K. Khalil 17. Laryngeal Dynamics of Taan Gestures in Indian Classical Singing Nandhakumar Radhakrishnan, Ronald C. Scherer, and Santanu Bandyopadhyay 18. Proximity/Infinity: The Mediated Voice in Mobile Music Miriama Young 19. When Robots Speak on Screen: Imagining the Cinemechanical Ideal Jennifer Fleeger VI. Negotiating Voice: Voice as Transaction 20. Robot Imams!: Standardizing, Centralizing, and Debating the Voice of Islam in Millennial Turkey Eve McPherson 21. Singing and Praying among Korean Christian Converts (1896-1915): a Trans-Pacific Genealogy of the Modern Korean Voice Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang 22. Building the Broadway Voice Jake Johnson Epilogue 23. Defining and Studying Voice across Disciplinary Boundaries Jody Kreiman
Nina Sun Eidsheim is Professor of Musicology and Special Assistant to Dean, the Herb Alpert School of Music, University of California, Los Angeles. She has previously authored Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (2015) and The Sound of Race: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (2019). Katherine Meizel is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her book Idolized: Music, Media, and Identity in American Idol was published in 2011, and she wrote on American Idol for Slate from 2007 to 2011.
Reviews for The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies
...the value of this collection is incontestable. Curating a dialogue between apparently irreconcilable perspectives, Eidsheim and Meizel show how much is to be gained from interacting across and beyond boundaries. -- Juliana M. Pistorius, Transposition
