Grains of Sound: Visual and Sonic Textures in Sand or Peter and the Wolf

There is a tendency in animation studies to discuss sound in the language of images, stressing sound’s alignment with visual cues (as in mickey mousing and leitmotifs). But sounds do not only mimic images: they add textures and emotions that change what we see. This article explores grain (texture) and timbre (tone color produced by specific instruments and techniques) as qualities shared by visual and sonic material. To do so, the author closely reads Sand or Peter and the Wolf (1969), where Caroline Leaf’s haptic sand animation is matched by Michael Riesman’s electroacoustic score. Leaf painstakingly molds animals by scraping away individual sand grains, and Riesman sculpts sonic textures with tiny adjustments to knobs and touch-sensitive pads on the Buchla modular synthesizer. Their collective improvisation with sands and sounds reveals new ways to think about artists’ material practices and the friction and interplay between images and sounds. They encourage spectators to perceive the animals as not merely plasmatic, or Sergei Eisenstein’s notion of contour-bending character animation. Instead, Leaf and Riesman deploy what the author calls ‘granular modulation’, expressing sand and animals with sensuous materiality. In Leaf’s and Riesman’s improvisations, grainy textures are the seeds of understanding how sound and vision become symbiotic – and encounter friction – in animation.</jats:p

Podcast Reenactments and the Sonics of Fictionalization from Cher to Swift

Podcasts often blend journalistic investigation with personal reflection, from Serial to Switched on Pop. Their veneer of fiction-as-fact especially confounds representation when podcasts’ voice acting and sound design portray pop stars in caricatured dramatizations. This paper examines reenactments of Cher and Taylor Swift in podcasts that investigate popular music industries and technology. As I show, these stars often are ventriloquized on podcasts due to their respective ages and visibility as women. Podcasts interrogate them for being too old or too young and for trespassing onto the often-male domains of business and technology. To show how podcast hosts represent women pop stars in particularly gendered and ageist ways, I listen to the sonics of fictionalization of two episodes that mythologize Cher’s Auto-Tuning and Swift’s battle to take back her masters from record industry men. First, American Innovations reenacts Cher’s request to producers to create the Auto-Tune effect, but the male host’s ventriloquy of her voice reduces her artistic and technological prowess to parody as they make her seem outdated. Then, in Business Wars, multiple voice actors reenact Swift’s career from its beginning and depict her as a child who doesn’t know any better. These podcasts blur facts and public opinion with alluring dramatizations of what “really happened,” placing listeners in the scene with compelling voice acting and ambient sound effects. In these reenactments, podcasts’ affordances of intimacy and immersion—which hosts often herald as democratizing—perpetuate cultural mythologies about gender and age in popular music.</jats:p

Ride-along listening: Inclusive modes of musical analysis in <i>Switched on Pop</i>

Popular music and pop song-dissection podcasts often compete for top 40 listeners’ attention, but podcasts interject hosts’ opinions of songs that listeners may not share. This article introduces a phenomenon I call ‘ride-along listening’, where podcast hosts play isolated musical features to closely examine a song’s production and reception. Hosts’ instantaneous explanations of musical terms have the potential to make pop podcasts more inclusive for non-musically trained listeners. As I show, Switched on Pop’s Episode 80 dissects Janelle Monáe’s ‘Make Me Feel’ by playing the single’s harmonies and rhythms back-to-back with those of the blues, Michael Jackson and Prince. But guest host Lizzo ‐ a classically trained flutist, songwriter, singer and rapper ‐ especially makes Monáe’s social message of fluid sexuality palpable for specialist and non-specialist listeners alike. By foregrounding performing musicians’ embodied listening and knowledge, ride-along listening can provide inclusive ways of dissecting the medium and the message of pop music.</jats:p

Electric Ladies in Playback

Playback, the process of separately recording actors’ images and voices in cinema and media, has a long history of cultural stereotyping. This article analyses how performers are typecast when media technicians manipulate sound/image synchronisation in lip sync and dubbing. Inspired by Janelle Monáe’s oeuvre, I focus my study through the figure of the electric lady - female simulacra who are programmed by heteronormative, patriarchal operators. I trace the electric lady back to talking machines (Faber’s Euphonia) and early phonograph recordings (minstrelsy and opera singer Agnes Davis) to show how proto- and post-phonographic notions of playback are bound up with racialised and gendered stereotypes. Drawing on the work of Alice Maurice, Mary Ann Doane, Jennifer Fleeger, and others, I illustrate how industrial practices of playback reproduce the sounds and images of ideal femininity and obedient Others. In her ‘emotion picture’ Dirty Computer (2018), Monáe transforms history’s electric lady from obstinate object to empowered subject by unmasking homogenising operations of playback. Monáe lip syncs as multiple personae to showcase the material heterogeneity of her Black, queer, and feminist identities. Ultimately, Monáe’s hybrid personae mobilise Doane’s notion of the masquerade in their defiance of playback norms that would bind Monáe to racialised and gendered images.</jats:p

Music’s Visual Waves: Popular Music Technology and Audiovisual Aesthetics

This dissertation explores how technological innovations influenced music and visual culture over four decades, from 1960s transistor radios to 1990s Auto-Tune. Portable music technologies in the postwar era inspired American and British filmmakers and pop stars to give pop songs increasingly mobile and visual meanings. In the 1960s and ’70s, American avant-garde filmmakers transformed pop songs’ often patriarchal and heteronormative subject matter with moving images that championed women’s and sexual liberation. And when music videos became a cultural phenomenon from the 1980s on, singers and producers mobilized popular music as a tool for political action through new visual contexts that emphasize countercultures and shatter stereotypes. Studies of pre-existing music in media have mainly focused on how pop songs shape film aesthetics—that a song of a particular era, for example, transports spectators to that time through their aural memories. This dissertation takes up an understudied aspect of media’s pre-existing music: the crucial role of music technology in how media portray, and make, history and culture. Magnetic tape, digital samplers, and voice manipulation software, with their ability to fragment and recombine pop music, irrevocably altered how humans could remix and defy forms of representation in visual media with pre-existing pop songs. New waves of visualizing recorded voice, sound, and music in postwar music technology, I argue, reveal shifting depictions of what it means to be human. Each chapter follows a two-part structure to oscillate between sonic and visual culture. First, I show how the historical and economic origins of music recording technologies shape the new sounds that pop artists make to express themselves and their societies. Second, I examine how the visual imagery paired with found pop songs in avant-garde films and contemporary music videos reflects attitudes toward gender, sexuality, race, and more. Throughout, I reveal an audio-visual feedback loop between music and screen technologies, which mutually influence how people express aspects of identity in certain decades. Chapter 1 explores how the avant-garde filmmakers Barbara Rubin and Kenneth Anger appropriated pop songs from transistor radios in their 1963 films. Their queer imagery subverts the typical heterosexual meanings of pop for spectators. Chapter 2 tracks how Karen Carpenter and Yoko Ono used magnetic tape overdubbing to amplify women’s embodied experiences. By multiplying the emotional effects of their voices, they contest male-dominated walls of sound (e.g., the Beach Boys and the Beatles). Chapter 3 analyzes the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument—the first digital sampler with a computer screen—to chart an alternate history of ’80s MTV. When Kate Bush, Herbie Hancock, and others drew music with the Fairlight’s light pen, they transformed not only sampling in pop music but also the visual style of early music videos. Chapter 4 revises Auto-Tune from an inauthentic gimmick to a distinctly audiovisual tool for creating pop music personas. Cher and her Auto-Tune heirs expand the sound and look of female pop stars. Across these chapters, I show how music technologies shape trends and countercultures in visual culture, and how experimental and mainstream art impact one another