A Blaze of Light in Every Word: Analyzing the Popular Singing Voice

A Blaze of Light in Every Word: Analyzing the Popular Singing Voice
ISBN-10
0190052201
ISBN-13
9780190052201
Category
Music
Pages
216
Language
English
Published
2020
Publisher
Oxford University Press, USA
Author
Victoria Malawey

Description

"Singing Voice presents a conceptual model for analyzing vocal delivery in popular song recordings focused on three overlapping areas of inquiry: pitch, prosody, and quality. The domain of pitch, which refers to listeners' perceptions of frequency, considers range, tessitura, intonation, and registration. Prosody, the pacing and flow of delivery, comprises phrasing, metric placement, motility, embellishment, and consonantal articulation. Qualitative elements include timbre, phonation, onset, resonance, clarity, paralinguistic effects, and loudness. Intersecting all three domains is the area of technological mediation, which considers how external technologies, such as layering, overdubbing, pitch modification, recording transmission, compression, reverb, spatial placement, delay, and other electronic effects, impact voice in recorded music. Though the book focuses primarily on the sonic and material aspects of vocal delivery, it situates these aspects among broader cultural, philosophical, and anthropological approaches to voice with the goal to better understand the relationship between sonic content and its signification. Drawing upon transcription and spectrographic analysis as the primary means of representation, as well as modes of analysis, this book features in-depth analyses of a wide array of popular song recordings spanning genres from indie rock to hip hop to death metal, develops analytical tools for understanding how individual dimensions make singing voices both complex and unique, and synthesizes how multiple aspects interact to better understand the multi-dimensionality of singing voices"--

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