The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music

Abstract

The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality is Nina Sun Eidsheim's second work examining vocal timbre. In her previous book, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as a Vibrational Practice (Duke, 2015), she explored the “materially contingent” (4) aspect of sound in voice, showing how parameters and measurements of sound affect listening to sound. In The Race of Sound, Eidsheim investigates how this listening of vocal timbre is often essentialized as representing the fixed essence of a person, with a consequent false projection of social identities onto these essentialist vocal sounds in African American music.Her focus on timbre highlights a core form of music expression that has been largely overlooked by most authors until recently, while her investigation of timbral discrimination by race and gender in African American vocal music is a much-needed addition in tune with current themes in ethnomusicology. With a background in the practice, study, and research of vocal performance (44), Eidsheim is well-placed to consider vocal timbre, and she acknowledges how her own perspective as a Norwegian-raised, South Korean-born musician informs her awareness of identity dissonance in vocal performance (185).Eidsheim's research is guided by reversing Schaeffer's acousmatic question (2, 3), “Who is this who is speaking?” (42), instead asking who is doing the listening (24, 42). She posits that listeners frame how vocal sound is heard through essentializing it—hearing it as an immutable type—as the essence of a person (9, 25). She argues that casual listeners essentialize vocal timbre in ways that allow them to project social identities such as race and/or gender onto the performer's vocal timbre, rather than hearing that timbre as a product of style and technique (32, 33). Eidsheim investigates her question through four case studies focusing on African American singers of Western opera and jazz, covering the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, with a brief foray into computer-synthesised vocal pop.Through these case studies, Eidsheim explores who is doing the listening, and how they are listening by deconstructing assumptions that listeners have projected onto the vocal sound. She opens by investigating how vocal timbre is not an essentialized trait but is instead contingent on context and training, which themselves are framed and narrated through the historical moment (34), as exemplified in the experiences of early African American opera singers. Eidsheim then explores in more detail how voice is the product of training and style, rather than race and gender, through her study of the jazz singer Jimmy Scott.Eidsheim's assessment of jazz singer Jimmy Scott highlights her key theme—that listeners frame the vocal sound—by identifying how essentialist constructions of race and gender projected onto Scott's voice framed his representation and management in the music industry. An African American, Scott's distinct vocal timbre, an effect of a medical hypogonadic condition known as Kallmann syndrome, challenged gender and sexual norms (93). His condition meant that puberty didn't happen as expected; as a result, his voice didn't develop like most male singers, although his vocal pitch range (tenor) remained only slightly higher than that of many of his contemporaries. Through careful analysis of vocal examples, Eidsheim identifies the crucial distinguishing feature of Scott's vocal sound as timbre, which remained unchanged throughout his spoken and sung range (109), unlike male singers’ voices that developed normally during adolescence, whose timbre changes when singing falsetto. Moreover, he did not downplay his distinctive timbre but instead made it a consistent feature of his live and recorded performances.Scott was active between the 1940s and 1960s before disappearing from public view until a comeback in the 1980s. Throughout most of his career, he was presented as a novelty act or as an unnamed, unidentified, and uncredited vocalist suggestive of gender ambiguity (96, 97). Eidsheim argues that the music industry and Scott's listeners had trouble framing his vocal sound according to their racial, gendered, and sexual expectations of an African American voice (101). Scott himself identified as a heterosexual male who happened to focus on music, an identity unconnected with that construed by his marketers and audiences (112).By contrast with the rest of the book, Eidsheim's foray into the world of Vocaloid—electronically simulated voices that have become a global pop phenomenon, especially in Japan—seems a little diversionary. Although the opening discussion of attempts to simulate a soul singer (121) is broadly relevant to her African American focus, and her use of Vocaloid to scrutinize essentialist profiling of vocal timbre adds acoustic detail, Eidsheim's extensive discussion of Vocaloid as a Japanese phenomenon is slightly at odds with her African American theme. Nevertheless, this discussion does highlight how issues of identity are carried over into the computational realm of music (150).Eidsheim shows how common perceptions of vocal stability and essence—race and gender—are pervasive even in the digital world of Vocaloid, and she suggests that audiences switch between hearing the voice as essentialist and hearing it as a product of style and training. She argues that this switch among listeners creates a space that confers performer agency, which singers like Billie Holiday (171) and her many emulators exploit through vocal entrainment and intentional style choices (175). Eidsheim concludes by emphasizing that listeners and singers-as-listeners (180) recognize the role of style and training in shaping the sound of the voice to counter essentialist constructions of vocal timbre.The Race of Sound investigates the essentializing of vocal timbre of African American music through different genres over about 150 years, addressing both the underresearched role of timbre and its use as a vehicle for essentialist constructions of race and gender. The text will appeal to readers wishing to learn about vocal timbre and the ways it may be perceived, and its framing in African American music, as well as to readers focusing on race, gender, and other forms of discrimination in both African American music and other musical contexts.