Vocal Depersonalization in Scat Singing

Abstract

"The purpose of this paper is to question the amount of personal investment in exploring the voice as an impersonal sound, in scat singing. Jazz singers and jazz voice teachers follow vocal practices that aim to control and distort the vocal timbre, to master microtonal intervals, to push and eventually overcome the voice’s limits. In scat singing, the boundaries of gender are subdued to the impulse of improvisation, thus, even though the timbre is a biological and a physical memory, influenced by the singer’s culture and experiences, the gender encoding can be reshaped inside the licks and patterns of the improvisation section. The current paper aims to prove that scat singing is the neutral ground where aspects of the voice can blend and disappear into one another: voice gender, vocal timber, technique, individual materiality, experimentation. Keywords: scat, improvisation, jazz, vocalists "