The story of Oh: the aesthetics and rhetoric of a common vowel sound

Studies in Musical Theatre is the only peer-reviewed journal dedicated to musical theatre. It was launched in 2007 and is now in its seventh volume. It has an extensive international readership and is edited by Dominic Symonds and George Burrows. This article investigates the use of the ‘word’ ‘Oh’ in a variety of different performance idioms. Despite its lack of ‘meaning’, the sound is used in both conversation and poetic discourse, and I discuss how it operates communicatively and expressively through contextual resonances, aesthetic manipulation and rhetorical signification. The article first considers the aesthetically modernist work of Cathy Berberian in Bussotti’s La Passion Selon Sade; then it considers the rhetorically inflected use of ‘Oh’ to construct social resonance in popular song;finally, it discusses two important uses of the sound ‘Oh’ which bookend the Broadway musical Oklahoma!, serving to consolidate the allegorical and musico-dramatic narrative of the show

The story of Oh: the aesthetics and rhetoric of a common vowel sound

Studies in Musical Theatre is the only peer-reviewed journal dedicated to musical theatre. It was launched in 2007 and is now in its seventh volume. It has an extensive international readership and is edited by Dominic Symonds and George Burrows. This article investigates the use of the ‘word’ ‘Oh’ in a variety of different performance idioms. Despite its lack of ‘meaning’, the sound is used in both conversation and poetic discourse, and I discuss how it operates communicatively and expressively through contextual resonances, aesthetic manipulation and rhetorical signification. The article first considers the aesthetically modernist work of Cathy Berberian in Bussotti’s La Passion Selon Sade; then it considers the rhetorically inflected use of ‘Oh’ to construct social resonance in popular song;finally, it discusses two important uses of the sound ‘Oh’ which bookend the Broadway musical Oklahoma!, serving to consolidate the allegorical and musico-dramatic narrative of the show

Acoustic Features and Perceptive Cues of Songs and Dialogues in Whistled Speech: Convergences with Sung Speech

Whistled speech is a little studied local use of language shaped by several cultures of the world either for distant dialogues or for rendering traditional songs. This practice consists of an emulation of the voice thanks to a simple modulated pitch. It is therefore the result of a transformation of the vocal signal that implies simplifications in the frequency domain. The whistlers adapt their productions to the way each language combines the qualities of height perceived simultaneously by the human ear in the complex frequency spectrum of the spoken or sung voice (pitch, timbre). As a consequence, this practice underlines key acoustic cues for the intelligibility of the concerned languages. The present study provides an analysis of the acoustic and phonetic features selected by whistled speech in several traditions either in purely oral whistles (Spanish, Turkish, Mazatec) or in whistles produced with an instrument like a leaf (Akha, Hmong). It underlines the convergences with the strategies of the singing voice to reach the audience or to render the phonetic information carried by the vowel (tone, identity) and some aesthetic effects like ornamentation