Acoustic Slits and Vocal Incongruences in Los Angeles Union Station

Over the last decades, much has been said and written about urban renewal and gentrification in Los Angeles. However, the issues addressed have been associated with the types of sounds present or created and musics played. This chapter examines the process of opera in relation to downtown Los Angeles’ gentrification. More specifically, drawing on Tim Choy’s and Ben Anderson’s notion of the “atmospheric” and “air politics,” this chapter addresses the ways in which considering the very acoustic part of the soundscape can offer entry into understanding of the process of gentrification. The listening into the acoustic realization of sound and the reverberation of distinct space can give evidence into broader and deeper shifts in the space’s value, otherwise often difficult to discern. The author does so by considering director Yuval Sharon’s and sound designer Martin Gimenez’s setting of Invisible Cities (composed by Christopher Cerrone) within Union Station’s waiting hall and courtyard. While each singer sang within the everyday soundscape and acoustics of the station, their voices were treated with a thorough sound design and offered up to audiences via wireless headphones. This partial interaction and selectively available product marks a project of “upgrading” the Los Angeles downtown acoustic soundscape—a process, the author proposes, that can be understood as an indicator of the late stage of gentrification.

The Evolution of Voice Perception

The human voice is a rich source of information and an important means of interpersonal communication. Beginning with Darwin (1872), nonverbal vocal communication has long interested evolutionary scientists, and in the last quarter century empirical research on voice production and perception from an evolutionary perspective has increased dramatically. One reason for this surge of interest is that behavioral ecologists and evolutionary psychologists have taken advantage of recent technological improvements in acoustic analysis software as well as sound recording and reproduction devices. More importantly, many voice researchers have recognized that the extraction of biologically relevant information from the vocal channel constitutes a set of adaptive problems widely shared across many species. Evolutionary scientists studying human vocal behavior therefore have a rich theoretical framework and an established comparative basis for developing specific research questions. For any vocal species, including humans, we should expect perceptual adaptations designed to process acoustic features of the vocal sounds of conspecifics (other individuals of the same species). An evolutionary approach provides a framework for specifying the nature of these adaptive perceptual problems. In this chapter, the authors describe recent work focusing on human voice perception from an evolutionary perspective and provide examples of the value of this approach for gaining a full understanding of this fundamental aspect of human behavior.

Fluid Voices

Theatrical impersonators have long been understood to demonstrate and celebrate the transgressive powers of transvestism. But there is always more at work than dressing up; wigs and sequins are not the only technologies of transformation. Voice, too, becomes a significant technology not simply of the Self, but also of multiple intersubjectivities. Though there is a small body of literature that addresses spoken impersonation among actors, there have been no published studies of singing impersonation. In this research, the authors have sought to arrive at some preliminary methods and approaches that might be of use in such studies. In the interest of working toward a more holistic understanding of voice, they have combined ethnographic and empirical methods to illuminate how disjunctures between bodies and voices are negotiated by a Las Vegas impersonator, and how they paradoxically contribute to the construction of these performers’ own identities.

Epilogue

The study of voice and voice quality has long been characterized by segregation across disciplinary lines, with little interchange of data or ideas between scholars who do not share the same research focus. Recent efforts have begun to merge traditions in the voice science community (for example, by examining the perceptual effects of changes in one or more aspects of voice production). However, studies by scientists of the manner in which humans produce and perceive voice quality remain nearly unintelligible to humanists examining issues of social, cultural, aesthetic, and political messages conveyed by the same phenomena, and vice versa. This chapter attempts to provide a preliminary foundation to support dialogues and promote mutual understanding between these two groups of scholars. The author’s intent is to show where these different scholarly traditions overlap, where they abut, and where they differ, with the goal of elucidating how these bodies of work might eventually combine as parts of a single discipline of voice studies.

The Voice of Feeling

This chapter addresses the nature of social worlds that coalesce around events of speech in two films from contemporary liberal culture: Love Actually (2003) and The King’s Speech (2010). Though one centers on romantic union and the other on the union of nation, both films culminate in scenes whose formal outlines are nearly identical: a character played by Colin Firth must deliver a speech, though his ability to speak is in some way compromised, and the coherence of a social order hangs on his ability to make his voice flow. By locating the drama of intersubjectivity in the individual’s capacity simply to produce a voice, these cases offer an alternative to a visual grammar of intimacy located in the return of the other’s gaze. Instead, they resonate with theories of liberal subjectivity that emphasize the way in which speaking itself produces an efflorescence of personhood. By focusing on speech and not the gaze, these accounts suggest that the other may be structurally negligible in cinematic scenes of recognition. The formal structure of intimate and national resolution in these films indicates a broader blueprint of liberal togetherness, one in which a certain concept of the voice sustains and unites an idea of individual expressiveness with the promise of a collectivity magnetized by feeling.

Building the Broadway Voice

This chapter investigates how differing pressures on the Broadway musical theater industry can contribute to certain vocal stylistic choices. The author considers the ways in which collegiate and professional training programs have responded to these needs through their musical theater curricula. The chapter brings into relief how vocal training in such programs ensures a sonic conformity, which presumably improves the marketability of the performer in an industry demanding predictable sounds. Specifically, it considers the pedagogical philosophies prevalent in Midwestern musical theater training programs where the author has worked as a vocal coach and where many Broadway performers cut their teeth. The chapter takes no position for or against the vocal ideas taught in these or other musical theater training programs, but makes some observations for the unique demands attached to such training and what demands those pressures make on singers today. Furthermore, the chapter suggests that the growth of the Broadway musical as a tourist attraction, the rise of the megamusical, and the formation of this Broadway sound are all interrelated phenomena enabled by a new corporatizing ideology in musical theater that has disciplined the body of the Broadway performer for decades and continues to shape the industry’s sound today.

Singing High

Drawing on a case study of African American countertenor Patrick Dailey and an ethnography of his live performance, this chapter is an ethnomusicological assessment of his social and theological navigation of gendered vocal sound. African American gospel singing challenges the binary gender framework that the American public expects, with men singing low and women singing high. As a man who sings high, Dailey has to demonstrate performance competence in African American worship. Dailey deftly negotiates the tensions and intersections between these dual processes of musical performance. He does so with an aspiration to deliver a presentation that is what he refers to as “anointed”: music that is from and for God. Dailey’s performance also engages African American audiences’ various types of cultural familiarity to portray competency as a worship leader and trained artist. Thus, while making a mark in sacred music history, more generally, Patrick Dailey’s performance reveals the subtle ways Western art music conventions of classifying vocalists are utilized and revised in the interpretation of cross-cultural performance in African American churches.

What Was the Voice?

This chapter considers what classical antiquity understood the voice to be, as well as how that understanding has influenced subsequent Western thought. The chapter begins with discussion of song, a term that antiquity applied to written poetry as well as to song proper. It then turns to more general questions about how the Greeks and Romans theorized the relationship of the voice to language. After explaining some of the principal terms for “voice” in both Greek and Latin, the author reviews the vocal theories of various schools of ancient philosophy. He then considers the role of the voice in oratory and the special problems generated by the growing circulation of speeches in written form. He turns finally to a celebrated if perhaps apocryphal vocal performance by a pantomime in Rome in order to consider the tension between the particular voice of an individual and the more generic vocality of antiquity itself

Voice in Charismatic Leadership

Voice is one of the most reliable and efficient behaviors that charismatic leaders use to convey their personality traits and emotional states in order to influence followers. Charismatic leaders manipulate voice acoustic characteristics through language and culture-based conventions. These manipulations cause different vocal qualities resulting in the perception of leaders’ different traits and types of charisma. This chapter first illustrates a sociocognitive approach to describing the phenomenon of charisma in leadership and illustrates how charisma is described in cultures. It also addresses many issues of voice in charismatic leadership, such as the biological and cultural functions of charismatic voice, how vocal behavior conveys charismatic leadership, how the voice influences the interaction between leaders and followers, and how the charismatic voice is perceived in different languages and cultures.

Laryngeal Dynamics of Taan Gestures in Indian Classical Singing

Hindustani classical singing, a tradition practiced in Northern India, includes a prevalent pitch-modulating vocal gesture called “taan.” This chapter explores the performance and pedagogical basics of taan gestures as practiced by an elite singer and teacher. The aim of this study is to determine the physiological and acoustic characteristics of this gesture and create a platform for future research. The results of this study will also further the understanding of human voice production. The study found that the pedagogical taan gestures were slower with longer superior surface durations compared to the faster performance taan gestures. The voluntary control of the taan gesture seems to be facilitated by glottal adduction. When the artist voluntarily altered pitch, loudness, rate, or the subjective obstruction of the taan gestures, significant differences were seen in the fundamental frequency as well as in aerodynamic and kinematic measures across the different levels of each condition. In general, increasing pitch level, loudness level, rate of the taan gesture, and subjective obstruction levels resulted in steeper slopes to the F0 fall and rise within the taan gesture and significant changes in the laryngeal flow waveform, suggesting greater adduction levels. This study can be enhanced with further analysis of taan gestures related to different raagas, the basis of Indian classical music. These results not only add to the basic understanding of the multicultural aspects of singing but also advance the basic knowledge about human voice production.