A Blaze of Light in Every Word: Analyzing the Popular Singing Voice. By Victoria Malawey

Abstract

The introduction of Victoria Malawey’s A Blaze of Light in Every Word: Analyzing the Popular Singing Voice repeatedly points toward the seemingly uncontainable nature of the human voice. The parameters of its anatomical production and acoustic qualities vex attempts at enumeration. Their permutations proliferate once situated in contexts of music, speech, language, and technology. Employing vivid examples, Malawey complicates the equation further by granting that in vocal encounters there exist important (inter)subjective intentions and perceptions. The voice and its meanings are sprawling, messy affairs. Across decades of research and writing, scrupulously cited and thoughtfully coordinated by Malawey, the collective scholarly project to understand vocal phenomena has shared little agreement on terminology and goals. Useful generalizations and robust hypotheses have been few, and mostly restricted to specific contexts—indeed, Malawey limits her own assessments to popular music recorded in English in recent decades. Readers seeking to understand the voice with a tidy, one-size-fits-all formula will have to wait. But that’s not a bad thing; Malawey’s book demonstrates that we gain more by carefully articulating the richness of voices than by classifying or reducing them. It is a significant contribution.