Abstract
The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music by Professor Nina Sun Eidsheim opens with four distinct epigraphs. The first is from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, as Juliet ponders the distinct sound of Romeo, a Montague. The second is a quote on tone from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The third is from the court record of the 1995 California v. O.J. Simpson trial, quoting the prosecutor’s line of questioning that the voice heard was that of a ‘black man’. The final and perhaps most striking is a quote from Ralph Nader to the ‘Rocky Mountain News’ radio station in 2008 opining that President Obama is ‘talk[ing] white’. The astonishing thoughtlessness and callousness of this statement with all its imposed racialisms, prejudices and assumptions frames the radical, questioning tone that the book sets forth on voice, race and identity. How does one talk white? How does one sound white? The complex, structural nature of race and sound are often conflated. The Race of Sound seeks to address this conjecture, carefully crafting an argument against sonic essentialism, against the notion of an essential Black ‘voice’. To put succinctly, the book seeks to expose, unpick and problematise the racialisation of sound.
In the introductory chapter, ‘The acousmatic question, who is this?’, Eidsheim explores what she terms the voice’s ‘sonic potentiality’ (p. 7). The voice, she contends, is unique in the way it can exceed imagination, replacing the structural edifices of race and racialisation that typically encircle it. This lends to the ideal of the acousmatic question, one which theorises the decoupling of sound from its source. The question, brought to prominence in part by Pierre Schaeffer, an electronic music composer who recognised that in the mid-twentieth century, perhaps for the first time in modern history, technology had created the potential to sever the link between sound and its originator. The acousmatic question asks: how can we know a sound, without knowing its source? Eidsheim reconfigures this question via the prism of the voice and vocality. Similarly, she asks: what do we assume when we hear a voice? How can we know of a voice at all? Her response to this question, weaved throughout the book, is that we cannot in fact know the answer if we reduce the voice to an essence, contending that truth claims that place the ‘voice as a cue to interiority, essence, and unmediated identity’ (p. 2) are claims that flatten, oppress and contain. The Race of Sound, through storytelling, historical narratives and musicological analysis, describes the ways in which the systematic adoption of race into worlds of sound and vocality ascribes a ‘white voice’, ‘a black voice’ and so on in order to reproduce and institute a hierarchal sonic framework, what Eidsheim calls ‘timbral discrimination’ (p. 4). Each subsequent chapter works to foreground these systemic dynamics by deconstructing historical and modern styles of vocal performance by African American performers and artists, demonstrating the ways in which vocal performances identified as ‘Black’ are often cultural shorthands for racist imaginations and presuppositions. The naturalising of Black vocal performance, Eidsheim contends, provides it with an essence that lacks technique and skill. When ‘voice is mistaken for essence’ (p. 34), the vocaliser is mandated to perform the ‘erroneous logic that an essential black body gives rise to an essential black voice’ (p. 34). The Race of Sound seeks to uncover and expose the political and ethical dimensions of such malpractices as they produce a flattened sonic Blackness, an essentialisation of Black humanity via vocal timbre.
Chapter 2, ‘Formal and informal pedagogies: believing in race, teaching race, hearing race’, is an insightful peer into the sonic pedagogies of classical vocal instruction and Eidsheim’s own experiences as a teacher, researcher and vocal coach. Through her study and cumulative autoethnographic expertise, Eidsheim maintains that voices are not innate, but entrained, learned and cultural, shaped by what she terms a ‘pedagogical collective’ (p. 54). Chapter 3, ‘Phantom genealogy: sonic blackness and the American operatic timbre’, is a particularly fascinating evaluation of the Black Opera tradition. Eidsheim outlines the historical racial discrimination inherent in operatic performances, describing the typecast of African American male performers as baritones, typically led by villainous characters and plots. African American female opera performers on the other hand were sought in part for a ‘naturalness’, as though their voices were somehow ‘primal, primitive, untouched by cultivation’ (p. 73). Eidsheim demonstrates that the often-thought ideal of opera as a world of suspended belief is ostentatiously shot through with racialised typecasting, vocal negation and the reduction of Black voices to hollowed-out narratives, a phantom of Blackness. Chapter 4, ‘Race as zeros and ones: vocaloid refused, reimagined, and repurposed’, explores the ways in which the persistent racalisation of voice occurs for non-human voices as well as human ones. The vocaloid, a vocal synthesis software that allows users to create human-sounding voices, can be viewed as a technological interface in which race, sound and technology converge. By carefully examining the software’s various launches, programmes and vocal digital creations, Eidsheim submits that the voices produced by this idiosyncratic piece of music software are ‘wrapped in imagery that plays on blackface iconography’ (p. 121). An interesting addition to this chapter could have been an inclusion on the Vocoder, a popular music software tool used profusely in commercial hip hop and R&B in the 2000s. So as to further contextualise the interrelation between voice, timbre and technology, as Eidshiem notes ‘voices are communal technologies’ (p. 24), an expansion on the relationship between voice and Black sonic technology would be welcomed.
As with the Black Opera tradition in Chapter 2, the reproduction of Black timbral masculinity in Chapter 3 and the inimitable voice of Billie Holiday in Chapter 5, Eidsheim uncovers Black vocality’s ability to continually re-emerge as new in the face of typecasting, discrimination and racism. These issues bring to mind the questions in the field of the phenomenology of the voice, contributing also to the literature on Black Studies and musicology, along with broader debates on race, music and identity. The Race of Sound is thus an insightful addition to the growing body of work on the voice, fine-tuning concepts of vocality and timbre in the midst of rising racial complexities. It is perhaps a revealing and interesting time in which we live to read the book, in which ‘say her name’ has become synonymous with a growing collectivity, in which protests are accompanied by unified and dis-unified voices calling for change. Eidsheim notes that to listen is to know a voice, that ‘listening is a political act’ (p. 24). Yet, we continue to live in a time in which Black voices struggle to be heard. The Race of Sound contributes to this struggle in recognition and joins the record of activist scholarship that centres and respects Black humanity.