Voice as Action: Towards a Model for Analyzing the Dynamic Construction of Racialized Voice

Vocal timbre is commonly believed to be an unmanipulable attribute, akin to a sonic fingerprint. Because the voice arises from inside the body, quotidian discourse tends to refer to someone’s vocal sounds as inborn, natural, and true expressions of the person. What, then, are we to make of the common notion that a person’s race is audible in her voice? While it has been conclusively demonstrated that many of the physiognomic aspects historically employed as evidence of a person’s race—including skin color, hair texture, and dialect or accent —actually evidence nothing more than the construction of race according to the ideological values of beholders, vocal timbre continues to elude such deconstruction. Recent critical thought on the intermingling of the physical senses, including the so–called sensory turn in anthropology, “new materialist” philosophies, and recent advances in science, technology, sound studies, and media studies, underscores the need for scholarship that recognizes the voice and vocal categories as culturally conditioned material entities. Trends such as the metaphorical notion of “having voice” have to some degree obscured the material and multisensory aspects of voice. Conceived within the specific context of musicology and the general context of the humanities, this article seeks to demonstrate how the re–framing of voice implied by sensory and material inquiries redraws the topology of voice. I believe that this exercise may offer a deepened understanding of racial dynamics as they play out in our interactions with voice

The Race of Sound

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

The Power of Listening to Voices: An Interview with Nina Sun Eidsheim

On Thursday, May 20th 2021, Nina Sun Eidsheim delivered a keynote address as part of the 2021 Listening, Sound, Agency symposium. Titled “Re-writing Algorithms for Just Recognition: From Digital Aural Redlining to Accent Activism,” she argued that “voice- and listening technologies carry and reproduce the same social bias, discrimination, and racism […] as Kodak film and HP cameras [which] were calibrated for white skin colour.” Elaborating on this important research, Nina generously answered some questions about her current projects and interests, providing poignant backstory to her keynote, and inviting all readers to events at her UCLA PEER Lab in the next weeks and months

Voice as a technology of selfhood : towards an analysis of racialized timbre and vocal performance

In this dissertation I examine the production of race through sound in general and vocal timbre in particular, and investigate how the construction of the black voice-- against the backdrop of the normative white--in opera, spirituals, and popular music reflects deeply-held American ideas about race. Which processes have contributed to the racialized perception and reification of timbre? What are some of the social and political processes embedded in the cultural capital possessed by certain vocal timbres in specific cultural contexts and various historical periods? I trace modern vocal pedagogy to its origin in colonial ideology, and the concept of a classical African-American vocal timbre from Marian Anderson to the spiritual in the abolitionist era. Investigating the vocal synthesis software Vocaloid, I uncover the macro politics of race and gender as they are materialized in the micro politics of sound: dominant race and gender relations are reproduced through electronic music products and tools. My study of the ways in which producers have framed the African-American jazz and ballad singer Jimmy Scott--as, most saliently, a woman, and as symbolizing death--offers insights into how nonconforming African-American masculinities are desired and consumed. This dissertation ultimately investigates the performative and corporeal aspects of the singing voice, considering these phenomena in terms which involve both performers and audiences. As a consequence, I have shifted the focus of inquiry from the sound of singing--which I term timbre sonic--to the physical act of forming that sound--timbre corporeal--and proposed an investigation of the choreography of vocal timbr

Desktop Simulation: Towards a New Strategy for Arts Technology Education

For arts departments in many institutions, technology education entails prohibitive equipment costs, maintenance requirements and administrative demands. There are also inherent pedagogical challenges: for example, recording studio classes where, due to space and time constraints, only a few students in what might be a large class can properly observe and try out the procedures. These and other practical and pedagogical considerations when teaching using hardware may suggest that conventional studios may not provide the best learning environment. In this paper I suggest that desktop simulation may not only help to solve the aforementioned problems, but can contribute to the creation of a cooperative learning environment

From “Mama” to 0s and 1s : voicing and listening in the time of Covid

Prof. Nina Sun Eidsheim is from the Department of Musicology, UCLA, and University of California Humanities Research Institute. Entering academia as a singer, I’ve examined voice, race, and sound from a material and practice-based perspective. I’ve argued that a given voice is not “personal” or “singular,” but collective. That is, each person’s voice is made up of both the sound of their evolving material body and the sound of the socio-cultural pressures under which it was formed, and performs. To a large extent, these pressures are so strong that it is inconceivable for most people to flout them; repercussions include not being recognized, and even being shunned, by a community to which they wish to belong. For some, this can be a matter of life and death. Each vocal community’s listening pedagogy is like a panopticon ear. The panoptican ear coopts the sensorium and is programmed into technology. Referring to examples from the work of actor and play write, Anna Deveare Smith, I will to draw lines from a voice communities’ vocal technique, via the essentializing of the vocal sounds and style, to “confirmation” and amplification through listening pedagogy, including in code. As a small start, in this conversation, I propose concrete measures to turn the skill of the panoptican ear—a skill we all have without necessarily knowing we have it—from an instrument invested in whiteness to a sharp antiracist tool. This talk was originally presented at the online research training workshop Digital Humanities, Pandemic Futures on 23 Oct 2020, co-organised by Centre for Cultural Research and Development, Lingnan University, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute

The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music

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

Desktop Simulation: Towards a New Strategy for Arts Technology Education

For arts departments in many institutions, technology education entails prohibitive equipment costs, maintenance requirements and administrative demands. There are also inherent pedagogical challenges: for example, recording studio classes where, due to space and time constraints, only a few students in what might be a large class can properly observe and try out the procedures. These and other practical and pedagogical considerations when teaching using hardware may suggest that conventional studios may not provide the best learning environment. In this paper I suggest that desktop simulation may not only help to solve the aforementioned problems, but can contribute to the creation of a cooperative learning environment

The Race of Sound

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

Synthétiser la race. La performativité du timbre vocal: in Matthieu Saladin (dir.), Spectres de l'audible, Paris, Philharmonie de Paris

Nina Eidsheim, “Synthesizing Race: Towards an Analysis of the Performativity of Vocal Timbre”, Trans. Revista Transcultural de Mùsica, 13, 2009, online: https://www.sibetrans.com/trans/article/57/synthesizing-race-towards-an-analysis-of-the-performativity-of-vocal-timbr