Tools of Translation

Keys

Vocalization
Listening
Epistemology
Technology
Body / Physiology
Identity/ Subjectivity
Communication
Medium/ Media
Materiality
Sound
Performance
Pedagogy

Performance

Loudness

Loudness is a perceptual quality of sound that correlates somewhat with the sound’s amplitude or power, but also depends on its short-time spectrum. The loudness of […]

Loudness

Loudness is a perceptual quality of sound that correlates somewhat with the sound’s amplitude or power, but also depends on its short-time spectrum. The loudness of sinusoids depends on their frequencies and amplitudes according to measured and codified equal-loudness contours. The loudness of more complex sounds is harder to determine, particularly in cases where it may vary in time. The loudness of a sum of sinusoids lying in non-overlapping critical bands is roughly the sum of their individual loudnesses, but the combined loudness of two or more sinusoids within a single critical band, assuming they do not beat audibly, can be estimated as the loudness of a single sinusoid of equal power [Rossing 02].

Noise

Sarah Kessler

Noise

Popularly understood, “noise” indicates both unpleasant incursion and resistant cultural practice (noisy protest, noise music). Laura Marks suggests that noise indexes the infinite, constituting not merely that which renders images, sounds, and other signals less recognizable, but rather, embodying the “stuff whose patterns we can’t recognize” (2013). Along a similar and different line of thinking, Saidiya Hartman argues for the presence and continued emergence of what she terms “black noise”: a post-slavery sound rife with “wildly utopian,” anti-capitalist longings in the face of a silencing political rationality (2008). Noise remains resistant to a singular definition, and thus pregnant with possibility.

Noise

Miller Puckette

An audio signal that cannot be analyzed as a sum of sinusoids can, alternatively, be characterized as noise. (These two possibilities, sums of sinusoids and noise, […]

Noise

An audio signal that cannot be analyzed as a sum of sinusoids can, alternatively, be characterized as noise. (These two possibilities, sums of sinusoids and noise, aren’t exhaustive but are rather two extremes with many other intermediate possibilities.) Measuring a noisy signal’s short-time power spectrum will give a random result whose average is the power spectrum of the noise. If this is a constant independent of frequency, the noise is characterized as white, in analogy with the visible spectrum.

White noise can be synthesized as a sequence of independent random amplitudes (samples). Noise that is not white can be derived from white noise by filtering. Noise generators and oscillators make up the traditional palette of synthesis options in electronic music.

Perceived Benefits of Choral Singing

Julene Johnson

A growing body of literature suggests that participation in a choir may have physical, psychological, and cognitive benefits. That is, adults who participate in […]

Perceived Benefits of Choral Singing

A growing body of literature suggests that participation in a choir may have physical, psychological, and cognitive benefits. That is, adults who participate in choirs report in surveys that they

Performativity

Sarah Kessler

A term that first emerged in the context of speech act theory (J. L. Austin), and which was later popularized by queer critical theorists […]

Performativity

A term that first emerged in the context of speech act theory (J. L. Austin), and which was later popularized by queer critical theorists Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick. When an expression is performative, it is both a figure of speech and an action. One paradigmatic example is the “I do” of the marriage ceremony, where the words themselves enact the legality of getting married. Similarly, “I promise” itself carries out a promise. One could say that performativity is an example of the voice’s nonlinguistic force, as much as it exemplifies the power of language.

Polyvocal

Sarah Kessler

Produced or delivered by many voices. And these voices do not have to come from separate sources, or be acknowledged as coming from separate […]

Polyvocal

Produced or delivered by many voices. And these voices do not have to come from separate sources, or be acknowledged as coming from separate sources. For instance, in a Richard Pryor performance, there’s a crucial polyvocality, and yet these utterances visibly emerge from the same body. Similarly, when a ventriloquist performs on the stage, in the traditional Vaudevillian mode, she activates a certain polyvocality in her practice: we know, yet disavow, that the two voices we hear are in fact emanating from the human body before us. And yet do we know this?

Power

Power is a physical measure of an audio signal, proportional to the square of its amplitude. One can also specify or measure a physical sound’s […]

Power

Power is a physical measure of an audio signal, proportional to the square of its amplitude. One can also specify or measure a physical sound’s total power flux through a fixed area in space, which also varies continuously. Power may be averaged over a period of time; such an average is referred to as RMS (root mean square) power.

[Rossing 02] Thomas Rossing, et al., The Science of Sound, third edition. Addison-Wesley, 2002.

Presence (liveness)/ Absence (deadness)

Caitlin Marshall

As an object of study in the humanities, is frequently discussed as existing (confusingly) in between and across the famous, ‘Deconstructionist era,’ dichotomies of […]

Presence (liveness)/ Absence (deadness)

As an object of study in the humanities, is frequently discussed as existing (confusingly) in between and across the famous, ‘Deconstructionist era,’ dichotomies of presence and absence, liveness and deadness. Voice is at once something that signals the presence of someone or something (the being or thing that voiced), and it is generally assumed that the presence that voices is a live one (computers, smart phones, GPS, talking dolls and text to speech software uncannily complicate this deep-seated association of voice with living being by housing “dead” voices). By the same token, in its ability to be recorded (either in transcribed text or on an analog or digital sound file) voice also has the ability to make itself present in the absence of the original being or object that produced it. Complicating matters, voice travels and can be transmitted, and so can persist as a live phenomenon absented of or outside of its originating body. Voice can also be generated through a present being but outside of that being’s body, as in the case of artificial larynx users or individuals using TTS software. If these threads seem tangled, it’s because they are. These dichotomies (not so dichotomous it seems) were used originally to theorize texts and textuality. While it may no longer be useful to employ deconstructionist approaches to voice studies, it does seem pertinent to ask a larger question: why are questions of ontology (being) traditionally raised by the specter of voice? How do we expect voice to arbitrate questions of being, etc?

Prosody

Although prosody is a quality of speech rather than singing, it is of vital importance to anyone setting text to music. The rising and […]

Prosody

Although prosody is a quality of speech rather than singing, it is of vital importance to anyone setting text to music. The rising and falling pitches of a melody, along with rhythm and sometimes dynamic markings, impose a particular prosody on the sung text, that can appear natural or not, as a matter of musical choice. Musical settings of text can shift the emphasis of words in a phrase, or even help bring out alternative meanings hidden in the text. When setting tonal-language texts to music, a melodic setting could even contradict the text grammatically.

Rhetoric

Caitlin Marshall

Rhetoric is, to most, an outdated field of study: one that smacks of the 19th century and other questionable historic fads, such as ethnographic […]

Rhetoric

Rhetoric is, to most, an outdated field of study: one that smacks of the 19th century and other questionable historic fads, such as ethnographic display and say, manifest destiny. Rhetoric persists in the academy however, and could be best described as the artful arrangement of words so as to best convey argument or effect. It is the arranging business of rhetoric that I’d like to emphasize. This is the theatrical element of rhetoric. How words are staged vis a vis one another, vis a vis a listener, vis a vis a speaking body determines how they are received and the effect or affects they can produce. Rhetoric is merely an historic way of saying that form and content are intrinsically intertwined. Historically however, Rhetoric also referred not only to the artful arrangement of the meaning of words, but the theatrical dramaturging of their sense. To clarify, this meant that Rhetoric was invested in how the words (so artfully arranged) were delivered; rhetoric was interested in the performance of the words, and the artful arrangement of the performing body was part and parcel of the artful arrangement of speech. Though today Rhetoric seems to refer only to the limited study of texts and is frequently another way of explaining University wide writing requirements and English curriculum, this earlier understanding of Rhetoric has allowed me to think of voice as never just a biological given, but a social actor whose performance has been artfully arranged by long-standing protocols for social speech.

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keys to voice Studies

Tools of Translation

Keys

Vocalization

Listening

Epistemology

Technology

Body / Physiology

Identity/ Subjectivity

Communication

Medium/ Media

Materiality

Sound

Performance

Pedagogy

Performance

Loudness

Noise

Noise

Perceived Benefits of Choral Singing

Performativity

Polyvocal

Power

Presence (liveness)/ Absence (deadness)

Prosody

Rhetoric

©keys to voice Studies