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- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2018
Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2018
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Spiel, patter or sound effect: Tracking the residual voice on the travelling fun fair
By Ian TrowellAbstractThe travelling fun-fair, emerging from trade and hiring fairs prior to the twentieth century, is a beguiling and uncharted realm of illusion, deception, thrill and adventure. It offers a glimpse of the improbable and impossible, and a taste or touch of the unattainable. There is an immediate and overwhelming polysensory overload, of sight, of sound, light, smell, disorientation, performance and serendipitous sociality. This article tracks the voice on the travelling fun-fair and asks whether the contemporary situation, examining two specific examples of voice, is a continuation or break with tradition. The voice is approached through a nested consideration of the overall experience, the cacophonous soundscape (music, scream, mechanical noise), and finally a totality of voices as an element within the soundscape. This phenomenological approach – from the point of view of the ‘punter’ – is then balanced with a historical consideration of the showperson’s voice. These two approaches are then combined to examine the continuity of cultural tradition.
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Accelerations and speed limits: An essay on the vocal limits of semiocapitalism
More LessAbstractThis article examines how exposure to capitalist environments accelerates speech. Voice is proposed as a partial register of how we are as bodied subjects within affective environments with semiotic and communicative pressures. Voice is a locus of trauma, a sonic scar that sounds out the semiotic pressures of capitalism. Accelerated speech is posited as symptomatic of semiocapitalism. Mirroring, vocal convergence, psychotropic stimulation and exposure to accelerated speech in television and Internet are proposed as key factors that influence our speech rate. The trend of compressing increasing amounts of dialogue into television shows is argued to be a dramatic microcosm of how semiocapitalism conditions us to communicate faster. Finally, manifestations of our speed limit are explored. Vocal stalls or hesitations, the deceleration or pause of the semiotic flows we voice, are posited as symptomatic of the disjunct between the accelerating demands of semiocapitalism and the human cognitive and corporeal limit. The shift from speech to voice is symptomatic of trauma. The human buffering of the vocal fry is the sound of the human, subjected to the accelerating demands of semiocapitalism, reaching its limit.
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Can childhood trauma impact the adult voice through the brain?
Authors: Elisa Monti and Diana Van Lancker SidtisAbstractThere is considerable evidence that childhood trauma can affect the whole brain. In a related perspective, studies on brain and voice suggest that it takes a whole brain to produce a voice. Indeed, phonation is highly interconnected with activity at all cerebral levels, from brainstem to cortex, and within all cerebral systems, including limbic, motor, sensorial and cognitive. The authors of this article inquire whether and to what extent it is possible that childhood trauma has an effect on the voice through its influence on the brain. We specifically propose that childhood abuse and neglect could potentially affect voice quality in the adult individual through its effects on brain function leading to measurable physiological sequelae. Findings from voice studies are reviewed to support this proposal.
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The singer’s GPS: Rethinking traditional pitch instruction methods for straight-tone singing in commercial voice teaching
By Mindy DamonAbstractThe purpose of this quantitative true-experimental study was to determine instruction- type efficacy on pitch accuracy in straight-tone singing as used in commercial music, by the examination of differences in pitch accuracy scores of 59 female collegiate voice majors (N=59) at a large university in mid-Atlantic United States. In this double-blind study with post-test only control group design, the control group (n=19) received traditional corrective verbal cues (TCVC). Treatment groups received either real-time visual feedback (RTVF) with TCVC (n=20), or performed audio feedback (PAF) with TCVC (n=20). Data were collected via a demographics survey, audio-recorded vocal response and visual-recorded vocal response using the Sing and SeeTM software. Data was analysed using a one-way analysis of variance, and results show that the average gain in pitch scores of female students who received RTVF instruction were significantly better than female students who received TCVC instruction and PAF instruction. These findings suggest that private voice instruction may yield better pitch accuracy through the use of visualization, thereby lightening the cognitive load of the student.
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Towards a hopeful plurality of democracy: An interview on vocal ontology with Adriana Cavarero
Authors: Adriana Cavarero, Konstantinos Thomaidis and Ilaria PinnaAbstractMarking the philosopher’s 70th anniversary as well as fifteen years since the original publication of For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression in 2005, this interview with Adriana Cavarero considers the ongoing resonance of her propositions on vocality for the expanding interdisciline of voice studies. Cavarero situates her work on voice within the matrix of its contemporaneous discourses as well as current critical debate. In entering a dialogue with other voice scholars, Cavarero expands on her project of dismantling the aporous, solipsistic subject of western metaphysics and foregrounds notions of responsibility as fundamental to her understanding of relationality. Cavarero further attends to vocal practices, within the remits of academic exchange as well as in contemporary art, and postulates the key tenets of her current project on contingent politics, demagogy and the necessity to reconfigure the voice of the masses as plural.
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Reviews
Authors: Ginger Dellenbaugh and Matthew RahaimAbstractHearing SIGNS, Seeing Voices: The Voice At The Limits Symposium (2016) The New School, New York, 1 April
Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills, Kirin Narayan (2016) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 256 pp., ISBN: 9280226407562, p/bk, $25.00
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