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  • Nina Sun Eidsheim is a Professor of Musicology, in the Department of Musicology, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Fo... moreedit
Original poetry and select moments from the NAMING, UNDERSTANDING, AND PLAYING WITH METAPHORS IN MUSIC A Virtual Symposium April 29-30, 2022 UCLA PEER Lab Durham University Music Department The symposium was organized and the document... more
Original poetry and select moments from the
NAMING, UNDERSTANDING, AND PLAYING WITH METAPHORS IN MUSIC
A Virtual Symposium April 29-30, 2022
UCLA PEER Lab
Durham University Music Department

The symposium was organized and the document was edited by Nina Eidsheim and Daniel Walden.
and Keywords In this chapter, we discuss the dramatic narrative arc of what we call the timbre-race equilibrium, particularly how it unfolds in discourse around the career of singer Bobby Caldwell and during the blind auditions for the... more
and Keywords In this chapter, we discuss the dramatic narrative arc of what we call the timbre-race equilibrium, particularly how it unfolds in discourse around the career of singer Bobby Caldwell and during the blind auditions for the televised singing competition The Voice. We outline how audience confusion about Caldwell's racial identity has served as a reliable source of conversation and so-called clickbait. We also examine two instances in which The Voice employs this narrative arc, with the show's judges serving as listener-protagonists. These judges model a way of listening for the home audience, enacting what Eidsheim calls "informal listening pedagogy." In witnessing an effort to repair the rupture that occurs when race and timbre fail to align as expected, the public is entrained into normative-in this case, racialized-listening. In short, these examples model how we train ourselves, through this cyclical narrative arc, to hear timbre as racialized essence.
Introduction The Acousmatic Question: Who Is This? Chapter 1 Formal and Informal Pedagogies: Believing in Race, Teaching Race, Hearing Race Chapter 2 Phantom Genealogy: Sonic Blackness and the American Operatic Timbre Chapter 3... more
Introduction
The Acousmatic Question: Who Is This?

Chapter 1
Formal and Informal Pedagogies: Believing in Race, Teaching Race, Hearing Race 

Chapter 2
Phantom Genealogy: Sonic Blackness and the American Operatic Timbre

Chapter 3
Familiarity as Strangeness: Jimmy Scott and the Question of Black Timbral Masculinity

Chapter 4
Race as Zeros and Ones: Vocaloid Refused, Reimagined, and Repurposed

Chapter 5
Bifurcated Listening: The Inimitable, Imitated Billie Holiday

Chapter 6
Widening Rings of Being: The Singer as Stylist and Technician

https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-6868-7_601.pdf
Special journal issue on voice studies, co-edited by Nina Eidsheim, Annette Schlichter.

Contributors: David Kasunic, Zeynep Bulut, Katherine Kinney, Caitlin Marshall, Annette Schlichter, Nina Eidsheim.
Research Interests:
More than two hundred years after the first speaking machine, we are accustomed to voices talking from seemingly any- and everywhere. We interact daily with voices emitting from house alarm systems, cars, telephones, and digital... more
More than two hundred years after the first speaking machine, we are accustomed to voices talking from seemingly any- and everywhere. We interact daily with voices emitting from house alarm systems, cars, telephones, and digital assistants, or “smart speakers,” such as Alexa and Google Home. However, vocal events still have the capacity to raise age-old questions regarding the human, the animal, the machine, and the spiritual—or in non-metaphysical terms—questions about identity and authenticity. Moreover, individuals and groups perform, refuse, and play identity through vocal acts and by listening to and for voice. In this volume, leading scholars from multiple disciplines respond to the seemingly innocuous question: What is voice? While also emphasizing connections and overlaps, the chapters show that the definition and ways of studying of voice is ever so diverse. In fact, many of the authors have worked on connecting voice research across disciplines. We seek to cultivate this trend and to affirm the development of voice studies as a transdisciplinary field of inquiry. It includes diverse standpoints at the intersections of science, culture, technology, arts, and the humanities. While questions of voice address crucial issues within the humanities—for example, the relationships between voice, speech, listening, writing, and meaning—we also seek close interaction with the
social sciences and medicine in our search for a more complete understanding of these relationships. We use the term voice studies in this context as a specific intervention, to offer a moniker that gathers together otherwise disparate intellectual perspectives and methods and thus hope to facilitate further transdisciplinary conversation and collaboration.
On 28 May 2019, as we were finalizing this special issue, 22-year-old Kodi Lee’s audition for the fourteenth season of America’s Got Talent (AGT) went viral, making headlines on mainstream American news networks including CNN, NBC and... more
On 28 May 2019, as we were finalizing this special issue, 22-year-old Kodi Lee’s audition for the fourteenth season of America’s Got Talent (AGT) went viral, making headlines on mainstream American news networks including CNN, NBC and CBS. In the YouTube video we watched, which had nearly 18,000 views after just a few days, Lee walks onstage arm-in-arm with his mother, a probing cane at his right side, and stops in front of the panel of smiling, inquisitive celebrity judges. During the requisite introductory exchange of pleasantries between the competitor and his adjudicators, the viewer discovers that there is more to Lee than the physical markers of his blindness might reveal. When confronted with questions he struggles ever so slightly to get the words out, widening his mouth, arching his eyebrows, and pausing momentarily before speaking. The camera uses these few seconds of ‘dead air’ to dramatic effect, cutting to shots of the judges as they look on in (nervous) anticipation, awaiting his replies. When they come, the distinctive lilt and unorthodox pacing of Lee’s speech and the loud, blurty, dramatic tone of his voice, with some words in a surprising falsetto, convey something not readily visible to the eye. Indeed, we then learn from Lee’s mother that ‘Kodi is blind and autistic’, and, as if on cue, all erupt into an ‘awww’. She elaborates: ‘Through music and performing, he was able to withstand living in this world, because when you’re autistic it’s really hard to do what everybody else does. It actually has saved his life, playing music’. A few moments later, Lee takes a seat at the piano. After what seems like an extended pause, he proceeds with a breathtaking rendition of Donny Hathaway’s ‘A Song for You’. Predictably, his performance elicits thunderous applause and a standing ovation, replete with tears, cheers and people jumping for joy. The excerpt posted on YouTube had around 737,000 ‘likes’ after two days, and close to 60,000 notes from listeners who shared their emotional reactions in the comments section.
Many commentaries on the voice of singer Maria Callas note that her voice changed markedly over the course of her career, with changes often attributed to “ferocious dieting.” Such claims are particularly troubling in the absence of... more
Many commentaries on the voice of singer Maria Callas note that her voice changed markedly over the course of her career, with changes often attributed to “ferocious dieting.” Such claims are particularly troubling in the absence of evidence that weight loss affects voice acoustics, and in the relative absence of acoustic data testing specific hypotheses regarding expected changes in voice with dieting. This paper examines recordings from early and late in Callas’s career, and attempts to determine whether observed changes are more consistent with the acoustic effects of physiological changes associated with extreme and rapid weight loss (changes in hormone levels, respiratory changes, differences in tongue size/vocal tract dimensions, reflux, etc.), with aging (e.g., increasing vocal instability, changes in resonance frequencies, changes in F0), or with artistic choices.Many commentaries on the voice of singer Maria Callas note that her voice changed markedly over the course of her...
The voice of jazz performer Jimmy Scott raises interesting questions of how gender is marked (or not marked) in singing voice. Scott was born with Kallman’s Syndrome, which affects male hormonal levels and prevents the onset of puberty.... more
The voice of jazz performer Jimmy Scott raises interesting questions of how gender is marked (or not marked) in singing voice. Scott was born with Kallman’s Syndrome, which affects male hormonal levels and prevents the onset of puberty. Although he self-identified as a “regular guy,” in his career he was presented as a novelty act—a boy who sounded like an adult woman—or paired with gender-ambiguous images. This paper explores Scott’s voice in comparison to male and female peers, with emphasis on the paradoxical role of falsetto in creating a male vocal image.
In 2002, the University of California San Diego ArtsBridge America program initiated a project, funded by the National Geographic Society Education Foundation, that was designed to address the lack of standards-based geography content and... more
In 2002, the University of California San Diego ArtsBridge America program initiated a project, funded by the National Geographic Society Education Foundation, that was designed to address the lack of standards-based geography content and culture-based arts ...
On 28 May 2019, as we were finalizing this special issue, 22-year-old Kodi Lee’s audition for the fourteenth season of America’s Got Talent (AGT) went viral, making headlines on mainstream American news networks including CNN, NBC and... more
On 28 May 2019, as we were finalizing this special issue, 22-year-old Kodi
Lee’s audition for the fourteenth season of America’s Got Talent (AGT) went
viral, making headlines on mainstream American news networks including
CNN, NBC and CBS. In the YouTube video we watched, which had nearly
18,000 views after just a few days, Lee walks onstage arm-in-arm with his
mother, a probing cane at his right side, and stops in front of the panel
of smiling, inquisitive celebrity judges. During the requisite introductory
exchange of pleasantries between the competitor and his adjudicators, the
viewer discovers that there is more to Lee than the physical markers of his
blindness might reveal. When confronted with questions he struggles ever so slightly to get the words out, widening his mouth, arching his eyebrows, and pausing momentarily before speaking. The camera uses these few seconds of ‘dead air’ to dramatic effect, cutting to shots of the judges as they look on in (nervous) anticipation, awaiting his replies. When they come, the distinctive lilt and unorthodox pacing of Lee’s speech and the loud, blurty, dramatic tone of his voice, with some words in a surprising falsetto, convey something not readily visible to the eye. Indeed, we then learn from Lee’s mother that ‘Kodi is blind and autistic’, and, as if on cue, all erupt into an ‘awww’. She elaborates: ‘Through music and performing, he was able to withstand living in this world, because when you’re autistic it’s really hard to do what everybody else does. It actually has saved his life, playing music’. A few moments later, Lee takes a seat at the piano. After what seems like an extended pause, he proceeds with a breathtaking rendition of Donny Hathaway’s ‘A Song for You’. Predictably, his performance elicits thunderous applause and a standing ovation, replete with tears, cheers and people jumping for joy. The excerpt posted on YouTube had around 737,000 ‘likes’ after two days, and close to
60,000 notes from listeners who shared their emotional reactions in the
comments section.
Over the past seventeen years This American Life has functioned, in part, as an investiga tion into, and representation and construction of an American voice. Alongside David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Mike Birbiglia, and the panoply of other... more
Over the past seventeen years This American Life has functioned, in part, as an investiga tion into, and representation and construction of an American voice. Alongside David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Mike Birbiglia, and the panoply of other odd timbres on the show, Glass's delivery, pitch, and tone have irked and attracted listeners. Yet what began as a voice on the margins of public radio has become a kind of exemplum for what new radio journalism in the United States sounds like. How did this happen? What can this voice and the other voices on the show tell us about contemporary US audio and radio culture? Can we hear the typicality of that American voice as representative of broader cultural shifts across the arts? And how might author Daniel Alarcón's Radio Ambulante, which he describes as "This American Life, but in Spanish, and transnational," alter the status of these American voices, possibly hearing how voices travel across borders to knit together an auditory culture that expands the notion of the American voice?
Callas’s voice gives rise to unusually polarized reactions, from devotion to disgust. As an artist, Callas was judged as “temperamental,” “out of control,” unreliable due to her walkouts; while Callas-the-voice was considered... more
Callas’s voice gives rise to unusually polarized reactions, from devotion to disgust. As an artist, Callas was judged as “temperamental,” “out of control,” unreliable due to her walkouts; while Callas-the-voice was considered “mesmerizing,” “terrible,” having “‘lost’ her voice” from “ferocious dieting,” and also out of control. Filled with judgmental language about her body weight and questions of control, voice, and character, the case was seemingly ripe for a feminist critique that addressed Callas’s voice and body head on. However, within the concepts and vocabulary that are currently available, women find themselves the object of the gaze of assessment and criticism. For female singers, this takes place in the visual as well as the sonorous realm.

A recent revival of organology, critical organology, offers a new inroad into considering the body and its materiality outside self-perpetuating dogmatic language. In this article, I first draw out the main points of the public discourse around Callas’s voice and body; second, engaging Susan Bordo’s work, I consider how these narratives about the voice and body rely on ancient and contemporary sentiments about the female body, rather than on current knowledge about the voice; and third, I examine common assertions about Callas’s voice through what I conceive as a critical organological approach to voice research. In doing so, I seek to contribute to a discourse that will separate voice and body from gendered disparities; find a way to deal head-on with voice as a material, vibrational practice; and illuminate where and how vocal vocabulary and concepts are weighed down by millennia of gendered misconceptions.
"To play music, especially to improvise, is in part to bring oneself under the influence of other bodies from the past. We perform memories, our own and those of others. My body and my bodily practices are partly molded by memories... more
"To play music, especially to improvise, is in part to bring oneself under the influence of other bodies from the past. We perform memories, our own and those of others. My body and my bodily practices are partly molded by memories personal and cultural— which means that my body, my practices, are not wholly mine. To improvise, then, is to call on the resources of our bodies and catapult ourselves beyond the confines and capacities of our singular bodies."
Research Interests:
Through a consideration of the underwater singing practiced by contemporary American soprano and performance artist Juliana Snapper, this article addresses the inherent relation between materiality and the voice, the sensed and the... more
Through a consideration of the underwater singing practiced by contemporary American soprano and performance artist Juliana Snapper, this article addresses the inherent relation between materiality and the voice, the sensed and the singular. I focus on the physical and sensory properties of singers’ and listeners’ bodies; the space within and the matter through which sound disperses; and how the relation between these aspects plays an integral part in what it feels like to sing, and what it is possible to hear. I aim to demonstrate that a sensory reading of singing and listening may capture dimensions of the voice that are difficult, if not impossible, to account for using conventional analyses of music or standard readings of vocal repertoire. However, a sensory approach to sound does not offer a stable explanation of what sound or music is. Instead each such account unveils a composite manifestation of our understanding of sound at a given moment in time and space.
Marian Anderson’s 1955 Metropolitan Opera debut promised to be a pivotal moment that would create a level playing field for African American singers in U.S. opera. But an examination of Anderson’s career, as well as those of later African... more
Marian Anderson’s 1955 Metropolitan Opera debut promised to be a pivotal moment that would create a level playing field for African American singers in U.S. opera. But an examination of Anderson’s career, as well as those of later African American opera stars, reveals that their operatic engagements were often limited to marginalized characters. In attempt to understand this situation, this essay looks to the history of African Americans singing classical music from the mid-nineteenth through early twentieth centuries. Early classical singers’ careers and reception, even certain operatic repertoire, suggest that African American classical voices are heard through a complex filter constituted by perceptions of slaves’ voices, burlesque opera and minstrel shows, resulting in claims that blackness produces peculiar vocal timbres. This article, a case study of listening as a cultural-historical process, posits that perceptual sediments deposited during the abolitionist era continued to shape reception of African American operatic voices throughout later centuries.
Abstract Vocaloid is a vocal synthesis software package that "sings back" any pitch and word combination entered by a user, impersonating a singer with a designated sex, age and race. Lola and Leon, the first pair of... more
Abstract Vocaloid is a vocal synthesis software package that "sings back" any pitch and word combination entered by a user, impersonating a singer with a designated sex, age and race. Lola and Leon, the first pair of "singers" designed, were introduced as "generic ...
This can be downloaded for free from Dissertation Pro Quest.
Vocaloid is a vocal synthesis software package that "sings back" any pitch and word combination entered by a user, impersonating a singer with a designated sex, age and race. Lola and Leon, the first pair of "singers" designed, were... more
Vocaloid is a vocal synthesis software package that "sings back" any pitch and word combination entered by a user, impersonating a singer with a designated sex, age and race. Lola and Leon, the first pair of "singers" designed, were introduced as "generic soul-singing voices." Investigating vocal timbre as a cultural artifact, I look at the processes by which audience connect specific vocal sounds with particular ideas such as race and gender. Such reification of notions of race through vocal timbre is circular: audiences join sounds with concepts; (live or digital) performers respond to these sound/concept compounds, and in turn confirm the listeners' linkages. Thus an analysis of timbre as an inner choreography is necessary to begin to map and denaturalize the connection between vocal timbre and race.
Research Interests:
Diamanda Galás—vocalist, performance artist, and activist—will give a keynote talk at the UCLA Voice Studies Now conference. (This is not a concert, but a talk.) The event is free and open to the public. For further information about... more
Diamanda Galás—vocalist, performance artist, and activist—will give a keynote talk at the UCLA Voice Studies Now conference. (This is not a concert, but a talk.) The event is free and open to the public. For further information about Galás, see: http://voice.humanities.ucla.edu/press-release-diamanda-galas/

For directions to the talk, given in Schoenberg Music Building 1100 (Schoenberg Music Hall), see http://voice.humanities.ucla.edu/directions/

Please join us for this rare appearance.
Research Interests:
Conference in conjunction with the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies.

http://voice.humanities.ucla.edu
Research Interests:
http://www.humanities.ucla.edu/component/content/article/253 The UCLA Humanities Editor-in-Residence series, the brainchild of Professor Nina Eidsheim working closely with Barbara Van Nostrand, is designed to offer an opportunity for... more
http://www.humanities.ucla.edu/component/content/article/253

The UCLA Humanities Editor-in-Residence series, the brainchild of Professor Nina Eidsheim working closely with Barbara Van Nostrand, is designed to offer an opportunity for graduate students and faculty to gain familiarity and practical insights into the monograph process. The invited distinguished fellow will give a presentation on the book proposal process open to the UCLA community before consulting with Humanities faculty and students. (For more information, please see the Q/A below.)

The UCLA Humanities Editor-in-Residence series is created to facilitate long-term relationships between the UCLA Division of Humanities and book editors in the academic press arena, thus setting graduate students and faculty up for early publication successes. The UCLA Humanities-in-Residence recognizes that, to quote OUP editor Norman Hirschy, "authors and presses alike share a common goal and purpose: publish new scholarship well and with as broad of distribution as possible."

Public Event:

Monday, October 13, 2014

9:00am: Breakfast Reception

9:30am-11:00am "The Book Publication Process,” public talk, followed by Q/A

Royce 314

Distinguished fellows

Fall 2014: Norm Hirschy (Oxford University Press)

Spring 2015: Ken Wissoker (Duke University Press, Director of Intellectual Publics at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City)
Research Interests:
Date: Wednesday, October 29th Time: 3:00pm – 5:00pm Location: Young Research Library (YRL) 11360 Please RSVP: http://humssnewfacultypanel.eventbrite.com During this panel program, Graduate Students and Postdocs will learn about the... more
Date: Wednesday, October 29th
Time: 3:00pm – 5:00pm
Location: Young Research Library (YRL) 11360
Please RSVP: http://humssnewfacultypanel.eventbrite.com
During this panel program, Graduate Students and Postdocs will learn about the academic job search, targeting job application materials, and personal hiring experiences from recently hired faculty in the humanities and social science disciplines.
Panel will include new faculty from Divisions of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Moderator: Nina Eidsheim, PhD, Musicology Professor
Jesse Harris, PhD, Linguistics Professor
Marcus Anthony Hunter, PhD, Sociology Professor
David Kim, PhD, Germanic Languages Professor
Davide Panagia, PhD, Political Science Professor
Jessica Schwartz, PhD, Musicology Professor
Research Interests: