Catalog

Nothing but noise : timbre and musical meaning at the edge

Description:	xi, 215 pages : illustrations, music ; 25 cm
Publisher:	New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2022]
ISBN:	9780190495107 (hardcover)
2 of 2 copies available at NOBLE (All Libraries). 1 of 1 copy available at Gordon College. Library Location Call number Status Gordon College Stack Level 3 ML 3807 .W35 2022 Available
▸Nothing but Noise: Timbre and Musical Meaning at the Edge explores how timbre shapes musical affect ... and meaning. Integrating perspectives from musicology with the cognitive sciences, author Zachary Wallmark advances a novel model of timbre interpretation that takes into account the bodily, sensorimotor dynamics of sound production and perception. The contribution of timbre to musical experience is clearest in drastic situations where meaning is itself contested; that is, in polarizing contexts of reception where evaluation of "musical" timbre by some listeners collides headlong against a competing claim-that it is just "noise." Taking this ubiquitous moment as a starting point, the book explores affect, reception, and timbre semantics through diverse cultural-historical case studies that frustrate the acoustic and perceptual boundary between musical sound and noise. Nothing but Noise includes chapters on the racial and gender politics in the reception of free jazz saxophone "screaming" in the late 1960s; an analysis of contested timbral ideals in the performance practices of the Japanese shakuhachi flute; and an historical examination of the overlooked role of "brutal" timbres in the moral panic over heavy metal in the eighties and nineties. The book closes with a discussion of the slippery social fault lines separating perceptions of musical sound from noise and the ethical stakes of encountering another's "aural face." Read More

The race of sound : listening, timbre, and vocality in African American music

Description:	1 online resource (xiv, 268 pages) : illustrations
Publisher:	Durham : Duke University Press, 2019.
ISBN:	9780822368564 (hardcover ;
Electronic resource	Access for Gordon College via EBSCOhost
▸Traces the ways in which sonic attributes that might seem natural, such as the voice and its ... qualities, are socially produced. The author illustrates how listeners measure race through sound and locate racial subjectivities in vocal timbre - the color or tone of a voice. The author 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, the author untangled 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. Read More