Liveness and Mediatization

2021 ◽  
pp. 98-126
Author(s):  
Tereza Havelková

Chapter 3 approaches liveness as an effect of immediacy. It analyzes how hypermedial opera constructs an opposition between live performance and that which is “mediatized,” that is, generated or reproduced by media technology. Relying, among others, on film sound theory, the chapter shows how the effect of liveness becomes a function of a particular relationship between sound and its source, and especially voice and body. Where some scholars have played up the discrepancy between the voice heard and the body seen in opera, this chapter is attentive to how an apparent unity of voice and body is maintained within the context of hypermediacy. With the help of Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway’s opera Writing to Vermeer, the chapter suggests that an alignment of liveness with femininity and body-voice unity subverts some of the critical claims that have been made with respect to both live performance and the embodied singing voice.

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-340
Author(s):  
Amy A. Koenig

Abstract Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as scholars have demonstrated, can be read in dialogue with Roman pantomime dance, and the tale of Echo and Narcissus is one of its most ‘pantomimic’ episodes. While others have focused on the figure of Narcissus in this vein, I turn instead to Echo, whose vocal mimicry can be seen as a mirror of the pantomime’s art, and whose juxtaposition with Narcissus seems emblematic of the body-voice relationship in pantomime. Echo’s desire for Narcissus engages with an existing lyric tradition of depicting the relationship between singing voice and dancing body in erotic terms. In such situations, the desire is fulfilled if the performers are both singing and dancing, uniting body and voice in performance. The thwarted union of Echo and Narcissus, however, embodies instead the dynamics of pantomime: the subordination or absence of the voice in favor of the body, and the connection created between dancer and audience.


Author(s):  
Marissa Silverman

This chapter asks an important, yet seemingly illusive, question: In what ways does the internet provide (or not) activist—or, for present purposes “artivist”—opportunities and engagements for musicing, music sharing, and music teaching and learning? According to Asante (2008), an “artivist (artist + activist) uses her artistic talents to fight and struggle against injustice and oppression—by any medium necessary. The artivist merges commitment to freedom and justice with the pen, the lens, the brush, the voice, the body, and the imagination. The artivist knows that to make an observation is to have an obligation” (p. 6). Given this view, can (and should) social media be a means to achieve artivism through online musicing and music sharing, and, therefore, music teaching and learning? Taking a feminist perspective, this chapter interrogates the nature of cyber musical artivism as a potential means to a necessary end: positive transformation. In what ways can social media be a conduit (or hindrance) for cyber musical artivism? What might musicing and music sharing gain (or lose) from engaging with online artivist practices? In addition to a philosophical investigation, this chapter will examine select case studies of online artivist music making and music sharing communities with the above concerns in mind, specifically as they relate to music education.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Tobias Dienerowitz ◽  
Thomas Peschel ◽  
Mandy Vogel ◽  
Tanja Poulain ◽  
Christoph Engel ◽  
...  

<b><i>Purpose:</i></b> The purpose of this study was to establish and characterize age- and gender-specific normative data of the singing voice using the voice range profile for clinical diagnostics. Furthermore, associations between the singing voice and the socioeconomic status were examined. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> Singing voice profiles of 1,578 mostly untrained children aged between 7.0 and 16.11 years were analyzed. Participants had to reproduce sung tones at defined pitches, resulting in maximum and minimum fundamental frequency and sound pressure level (SPL). In addition, maximum phonation time (MPT) was measured. Percentile curves of frequency, SPL and MPT were estimated. To examine the associations of socioeconomic status, multivariate analyses adjusted for age and sex were performed. <b><i>Results:</i></b> In boys, the mean of the highest frequency was 750.9 Hz and lowered to 397.1 Hz with increasing age. Similarly, the minimum frequency was 194.4 Hz and lowered to 91.9 Hz. In girls, the mean maximum frequency decreased from 754.9 to 725.3 Hz. The mean minimum frequency lowered from 202.4 to 175.0 Hz. For both sexes, the mean frequency range ∆f showed a constant range of roughly 24 semitones. The MPT increased with age, for boys and girls. There was neither an effect of age nor sex on SPL<sub>min</sub> or SPL<sub>max</sub>, ranging between 52.6 and 54.1 dBA and between 86.5 and 82.8 dBA, respectively. Socioeconomic status was not associated with the above-mentioned variables. <b><i>Conclusion:</i></b> To our knowledge, this study is the first to present large normative data on the singing voice in childhood and adolescence based on a high number of measurements. In addition, we provide percentile curves for practical application in clinic and vocal pedagogy which may be applied to distinguish between normal and pathological singing voice.


Scene ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sofia Pantouvaki

The use of smart materials and wearable electronics has rapidly expanded in the field of fashion, introducing new interactive qualities of surfaces, materials and garments. In fashion garments, the performative environment functions as an abstract site for experimentation, expression and communication of the wearer through the intelligent garment. However, there is still limited use of embodied technologies in the field of performance costume for text-based and music-based performance, with the exception of integrated lighting technologies, currently broadly used in musical performance. This article provides a critical review of specific examples of technology-led garments in live performance, and uses a specific fragment from the Athens 2004 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony as a case study to highlight how technologies embedded in costume can create interactive interfaces between the body of the performer and the environment – the space, the other performers, the audience – becoming a transmitter and receiver of emotions, experiences and meanings in innovative ways. By analysing this case, as well as by posing questions, this article aims at generating a discourse on the expressive and narrative potential of the use of intelligent materials and embodied technologies within the creative practice of costume design.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Megan Corbin

Abstract: There exists a constant within the trajectory of Diamela Eltit’s contributions to New Chilean Fiction: the turn to the body’s revelatory capacity as a corporal archive of human existence. Simultaneously exploring and rejecting the confines of the traditional testimonial reliance on language, Eltit moves the reader to a re-consideration of the truth-telling function of the biological materiality of the body, placing imperfect corporalities on display as a means of speaking, even where the voice itself may falter.  This essay locates Eltit’s move to the corporal within the trajectory of feminist criticism, the traumatic realities of the Chilean dictatorship and post-dictatorship periods, and the search for the recuperation of those bodily knowledges represented by the disappeared.  Next, it turns to Eltit’s Impuesto a la carne as her most recent re-visioning of the importance of corporal textualities, whether or not the subject-matter of the body’s denunciation is connected to the dictatorship.  Lastly, this essay reconsiders the rejective power of the traditional archive, analyzing the effect set models have on those who seek to tell their stories outside of the traditional testimonial model. I argue that the case of Diamela Eltit is an example of the way writers and producers of cultural texts which actively inscribe alternative memories of the past are resisting the authoritative power of the archive and subversively inscribing narrative memory onto bodily materialities, re-orienting the view of the corporal from an evidentiary showing to an active process of re-telling the past. Eltit’s novels, inscribed with her corporal textual model, give voice to survivors, articulating an alternate historical model for the archive, embracing the biological and making it speak against the rigid abuses of authoritarianism.


Author(s):  
Vita Heinrich-Clauer

This article focuses on bioenergetic principles and the link between emotions and the voice, discussing various approaches to vocal expression in the psychotherapeutic process. There is an examination of the idiosyncrasies of bioenergetic work with the voice in contrast to therapeutic approaches that work solely with the body. There is an important distinction for practical bioenergetic work between liberating vocal discharge on the one hand and the build-up of tone, boundaries and self-efficacy on the other hand (cf. Shapiro, 2006, 2008, 2009).


Author(s):  
Guillaume Collett

While, for many, Deleuze’s philosophy is synonymous with his concept of the ‘body without organs’, and even though he first explicitly develops this concept in The Logic of Sense, a large part of the present book argues that it is rather the organ-ised body – here figuring specifically as incarnated structure, building explicitly on Leclaire – on which his onto-logic of sense hinges. Nonetheless, this body only emerges later on in the ‘dynamic genesis’, the psychoanalytic portion of The Logic of Sense which provides a psycho-sexual account of language acquisition and of the emergence of sense, and first we must turn to the dis-organ-ised body of Klein and Artaud. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze develops his conception of the body without organs based on a reading of the work of Antonin Artaud.


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