brettworks

thinking through music, sound and culture

Category: voice

February 5, 2013

On Lip Syncing And Musical Authenticity

Like a lot of folks, I watched the music acts perform at the Obama presidential inauguration. The Brooklyn Tabernacle choir, singing “Battle Hymn Of The Republic” sounded fantastic;

American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson, singing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” sounded smooth and polished;

James Taylor’s “America The Beautiful” was a reassuring presence;

and megastar Beyonce sounded quite amazing on “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Imagine the pressure to nail a song like that on a big occasion with many millions watching and listening?

But in the days after the inauguration, gossip about Beyonce’s performance began emerging until the gossip became confirmed fact: she had lip synced her song! I read several outraged news pieces about this, and all of them shared the belief that lip syncing is a profound kind of sonic deception–a kind of karaoke without the fun factor. No matter that it was cold out (hard on the vocal chords yes, but then neither the choir nor Clarkson nor Taylor had a problem with it) and no matter that Beyonce didn’t have (or make?) time to rehearse–one just should never ever lip sync. Period. To refresh your memory, other earlier cases of lip syncing in popular music that inspired public outrage include the entire career of Milli Vanilli

and Ashley Simpson’s performance on SNL in which her pre-recorded voice jumped the gun and began without the singer faking along to cover its tracks:

To her credit, Beyonce lip synced flawlessly to her own recorded singing and the result was what looked and sounded like a seamless performance. (It fooled me.) But when word got out that hers was fake singing, critics weighed in with discussions about the nature of authentically live musicianship. Writing in The Guardian, Gary Younge explained that performing live is important because it’s the only context where performer and audience can meet in a truly meaningful way:

“the essence of a live performance is the understanding that the audience is experiencing the event in real time and anything can happen. It is that combination of synchronicity, spontaneity and frailty that gives live performances their edge – it’s the one take that matters.”

It seems that there needs to be an element of risk for us to deem a performance the real McCoy. That’s what makes live music so thrilling and the news of Beyonce’s slight of mouth so disappointing.

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November 23, 2012

On The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes The Mind

Seth Horowitz’s The Universal Sense is an exhaustive, lucid, and entertaining neuroscientific foray into the many ways hearing, listening, and sound shape the mind–how sound affects the way we think, feel, and act. Horowitz is a professor of neuroscience at Brown University who specializes in studies of comparative and human hearing. He’s also an enthusiastic sound generalist, driven by a conviction that “much of the inner life of sound dwells beneath conscious thought” and gleefully sharing story after story on a dizzying array of topics related to human and animal perception of sound and music. Among these topics: Horowitz explains why some sounds are irritating (nails scratching on blackboard) or ominous (buzzing wasps), the unsettling effects of subsonic and infrasonic sound, movie soundtracks and jingle music, and the vibratory phenomenon that causes us to fall asleep while driving on long and straight roads. In sum, The Universal Sense is an inspiring read that further confirmed my own conviction that music and sound-making are very special ways of knowing the world indeed.

The more Horowitz explains it, the more our sense of hearing and sound perception seems very remarkable. Sound is the swiftest of emotional triggers, and our hearing is a faster sense than vision (“vision maxes out a fifteen to twenty-five events per second, hearing is based on events that occur thousands of times per second”). And hearing outpowers taste, touch, and smell by allowing us to perceive the world around us at great distances. But with this speed and power come vulnerabilities as well. Horowitz explains the many ways sound can “hack” the brain, and how we can engage sound or silence to deliberately hack our own minds. We can, for instance, limit the sounds that reach us to increase our focus (hello noise canceling headphones!) or voluntarily expose ourselves to loud sounds to give up control–as if under the spell of a hypnotist. I don’t know about you, but by these measures I am most definitely a mind hacker.

Horowitz also explains how sound can have particularly powerful effects on us when it makes deep perceptual demands. In one passage that reminded me of the challenges of perceiving polyrhythms (more than one rhythm sounding simultaneously), Horowitz explains that a key to musical entrainment is having multiple sonic inputs that are diverse yet also acting together: “To get massive amounts of brain entrained to a single rhythm, you need complicated input from a number of sources all acting in concert. One method is to use binaural beating…”

From here, Horowitz details how we perceive two pitches that are tuned slightly different from one another–like the gongs in an Indonesian gamelan tuned closely but not exactly the same–as having a “beating” effect. As we are reminded over and over again in this book, sound, even though immaterial, has very physical effects: the acoustic has affect.

Finally, Horowitz reminds us that affect is all important in how we understand sounds–whether the sounds of our favorite music or the sounds our own voices. Indeed, “the emotional basis if communication relies not on what is said but on the acoustics of how we say something.” Consider saying, Horowitz tells us, the word ‘yes’:

“Now say it as if you had just found out you won the lottery. Now say it as if someone had just asked you a question about something in your past that you thought no one knew about. Now say it as if this is the fortieth time you’ve answered ‘yes’ in a really boring human resources interview about how much you love your job [...] What you changed was how you said the words: overall pitch, loudness, and timing.”

Inspired by Horowitz’s discussion of “yes” I remembered a humorous video called “50 Shades Of Hey” in which an actor demonstrates dozens of different ways to say the word “hey.” The video demonstrates the musical and affective qualities of everyday speech and how easily we can discern shades of meaning out of slight variations of tone and delivery. From this perspective, making and listening to music is just one of the ways we make sense of the world through hearing sound.

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October 14, 2012

On Voice, Authenticity, And Not Being Fake

In a recent online interview excerpted in The Guardian, musician and Portishead member Geoff Barrow discusses the idea of singing with a “fake” voice. Leading the pack in Barrow’s view is the late Amy Winehouse, a white singer who sang, some people say disparagingly, like a black jazz or soul singer from an earlier era–or like someone doing an imitation of such a singer. (There is an excellent article on this topic by Daphne Brooks in The Nation.) Barrow just doesn’t buy Winehouse’s voice, saying that “her actual voice was fake. She had a real life with a fake voice”–a singer who “had become just a comic character of herself and how she sang.”

You can decide for yourself. Here is Winehouse singing her song “You Know I’m No Good”:

Out of curiosity, I read up on Winehouse on Wikipedia. I found a quote from the jazz singer Tony Bennett, who maintained that Winehouse’s voice was the real deal–not fake at all, but steeped in the jazz tradition: ”she was the only singer that really sang what I call the ‘right way’ because she was a great jazz-pop singer. . . She was really a great jazz singer. A true jazz singer.”

In contrast to Winehouse, Barrow mentions a few other female singers—including PJ Harvey, Barrow’s Portishead bandmate Beth Gibbons, and Bjork–who “change their voices while remaining themselves.” Presumably what Barrow means by this is that each of these singers assume a singing voice which, while not their speaking voice per se (after all, whose singing voice is?) is nevertheless somehow true to who they are. But how can a listener make this determination?

I have always liked Bjork’s voice, mainly because it’s so unique–a flexible tool that can sing those unusual Bjorkian melodies. And come to think of it, Bjork’s singing voice is just like her speaking voice but louder and more melodic, arising organically out of the same Icelandic source. Bjork sings in a way that sounds like a heightened spoken voice–as if she’s singing-explaining some very cool things to curious elementary school kids and getting carried away. Her voice seems to be true to who she is.

Here is Bjork singing her song “Moon” (which, by the way, features some devastatingly good overdubbed background vocals):

As for that best-selling singer of recent years, the Englishwoman Adele, Barrow adds: “Strangely enough I think Adele sings in her own voice, I think it’s her trying to be a big voice and that’s her.” But again, how does Barrow come by his insight? How can a listener know Adele is “trying” to be a big voice? Maybe she just has a powerful, big voice.

Here is Adele singing her huge hit “Someone Like You.” One thing I noticed about it compared to the Bjork and Winehouse songs is how massive Adele’s recorded vocal sound is. This is due to her big voice but also to a pristine recording that really booms:

***

These are all interesting notions: What does Barrow mean by singing with a “fake voice”? How do we know when a singer’s or instrumentalist’s artistry is fake or authentically the real McCoy? And what does it mean to change one’s singing voice while remaining oneself?

First, being “fake” in musical terms usually means making use of a style or idiom or timbre that isn’t “natural” to you, isn’t authentically yours. In the case of Winehouse, her detractors feel that she wholesale appropriated her vocal sound rather than…Rather than what? Developed it in isolation, free of stylistic influence? You can see the can of worms this opens up: How do we hear the difference between someone authentically inhabiting a sound as opposed to just fakingly co-opting it in a tourist-y kind of way? Maybe with singers, their voices either ring true or not, although a lot of singing–from pop to opera–sounds affected anyway. With instrumentalists, judging authenticity is even more problematic because instrumentalists can to some degree hide behind their instrument’s sound. All this to say that it’s hard to ever really know how genuinely artists lay claim to a sound and come by their knowledge of its stylistic conventions.

Second, whether we’re talking about singers or instrumentalists, we judge fakeness or authenticity by listening and trusting our guts, and I suppose, our eyes: Does this sound make sense coming from this person? By this measure, Winehouse’s slurred slinkiness, Bjork’s wandering wide-eyed rapture, and Adele’s bellowing all ring true. Each singer inhabits her own kind of authenticity.

Finally, as for changing one’s singing voice while remaining oneself, I’m not sure I understand what this means. Why does it matter whether or not one remains oneself as one sings or plays an instrument? Hasn’t making music always been a kind of theater anyway, a way for performers to try on different hats?

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September 5, 2012

On Sounds And Humor

It took all of three minutes, but the guy on the subway was making all kinds sounds with his voice and as I listened to him I couldn’t stop giggling.

Verbal Ace is his name and he’s a vocal artist, a human beatboxer, a singer, a sound effects machine, and mimic extraordinaire. Armed with just a microphone and a small battery-powered amplifier slung over his shoulder, he performs a stand up sonic comedy, leading his captive listeners on a journey through his strange audiophonic obsessions.

Ace’s performance begins with a brief personal introduction and then a throwback to “Axel F”, the theme song to the 1980s movie Beverly Hills Cop. Composed by Harold Faltermeyer, this synth- and drum machine-driven instrumental with its infectious (and cheesy) lead hook used to obsess me to no end. Here’s the original video for the song.

As I hear “Axel F” I smile while frantically searching for the audio recorder app on my phone.

Ace’s “Axel F” soon goes into remix mode, the drums morphing into turntable scratches interspersed with outsized shout-out interjections to–curiously enough–Sponge Bob Squarepants.

Ace does sound effects too: crickets and an alarm clock to start with and then onto the sounds of the recorded voice announcements heard on the subway. Ace does the woman’s and the man’s voices perfectly.

Now I’m laughing as I check the sound levels on my recording. Actually, there are no sound levels to check! It’s just that I can’t bring myself to look up at this unexpected source of audio humor so I pretend to be busy.

Ace (in the booming and chirpy male announcer’s voice): “The next train will arrive in one day.” And then this: “Thank you for riding the MTA–as if you had any choice in the matter.”

As the train makes its stops, Ace pulls out more tricks to pull in his audience. He interacts with the train’s sounds in real-time–imitating, for instance, the two-tone chime of the doors opening and closing to the point that I’m note sure which sound is the real one.

***

What makes me laugh is the musicality of Ace’s vocal mimicry. It’s one thing to have an ear for something, and most of us have very excellent ears in the sense that we can recognize the exact sounds of those male and female subway announcers’ voices after hearing them even only once. But few of us can build on our ability to recognize a sound’s distinctive characteristics and then verbally reproduce that sound ourselves. I wouldn’t even know how to begin doing a vocal impression of an alarm clock or a cricket. I know the sounds well but can’t produce them.

Ace also makes me laugh because of his ability to transcend what for most of us are limits to what our voices can do. Our voices are our primary audio stamp, our distinctive timbral profile that completes our physical presence. But Ace’s vocal pyrotechnics suggest, Gumby-like, a more fungible timbral essence; in fact, he seems to become whatever it is he imitates. I laugh because ultimately I find Ace’s uncanny way with sound a little unsettling. Here I am assuming that each of us is has a settled and fixed sonic identity while Ace demonstrates just the opposite.

Here is a video clip someone posted on YouTube of Ace doing essentially the same routine as the one I heard:

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May 29, 2012

On The Sounds Of Justice

A few weeks ago I was part of a jury for a criminal trial. The trial took nine days, and I had ample opportunity to listen–not just to all the legal stuff, the arguments, the evidence, but to the sounds of voices in the courtroom and in the jury deliberation room. Court proceedings are like musical performances in that they’re special kinds of rituals with repeated actions done in deliberate ways to achieve specific ends. In the courtroom, almost all of the action is verbal, and proper legal etiquette and protocol are everything. All is articulated, all is verbalized, all is sounded and noted for the record, all is compressed and captured into heard and felt words.

***

We the jury, coming from our deliberating room, are about to enter the courtroom.

Court Officer: “Jury about to enter.”

We enter and take our seats in the jury box.

Judge: “Do the people and the defense agree to the presence of the jury in their proper seating?”

Attorneys: “Yes your honor.”

Judge: “Very well. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back …”

I heard this exchange many, many times over the course of the trial, and the formality of the procedure to mark our entrance always kind of entranced me.

Sitting in our chairs, we heard the lawyers make their cases. Though arguing for different sides of the same coin, each lawyer used his/her voice to convince us right off the bat of the reasonableness of their side. The defense was particularly adept at sonically shifting gears, going into pseudo-casual tones or incredulous tones or confident swagger tones–all these shifts within moments of one another. I thought it was a compelling vocal display that felt like watching a virtuoso musician tear it up and amaze me with his instrumental skills. But it also reminded me of the work of magicians in that something about this facility with tone–ultimately a musical skill, really, right?–bordered on being an aural sleight of hand. Of course, I may just be overstating the case (pardon the pun), attuned as I am to sound of things. At any rate, it was a challenging task to clearly separate what the lawyers were actually saying from how they were saying it. Again, a musical analogy: there are many ways to play the same note and make it feel differently.

We the jury listened to witnesses too. And the judge advised us beforehand to pay attention to not only what they said but to their voices and body language too. And so we watched and listened to the stoic police officer whose small voice didn’t match his hulking body, the professional ballistics expert who sounded professional and matter of fact thank you very much, the emotional family member who sounded conflicted and distressed, and a witness who sounded, well, frankly erratic and unreliable.

***

After both sides had made their cases, we the jury retreated to deliberate. Up to this point, I hadn’t really heard the voices of my fellow jury members, nor they my voice, and so we began to talk. What soon became apparent was almost cliché: that the loudest voices in the room aren’t necessarily saying the most sensible things. But everyone had a voice, had a say, and we deliberated for two days. At one point, some of the quieter voices made their case to one of the louder voices–a quiet Have You Considered? sound in dialogue with I’ve Already Made Up My Mind sound. To my astonishment, I’ve Already Made Up My Mind gradually began to change her tune, morphing into a Well I Hadn’t Considered That and eventually into Well, Ok, I Hear What You’re Saying. It was like a musical improvisation, with tones of voices as much as reasoning acting upon one another to steer our deliberation along a path towards eventual (and necessary) unison agreement.

One of the reasons we the jury entered the courtroom so often was to receive clarification on legal matters from the judge. I didn’t realize that everything would be read to us only–no notes allowed, nothing written down. In the tradition of a true oral tradition, we had to listen and try to remember our terms and definitions from the judge’s performance. Interestingly, the judge didn’t make use of affect in his voice as he slowly and carefully unpacked layers of meaning for us. It was clinical and up to us to apply the judge’s definitions to our deliberations.

But while we the jury worried about remembering the sounds we had just heard, a silent woman sitting in front of the judge was capturing every word spoken at the trial. She of course was the court reporter working on her small and mysterious stenography machine, translating heard words into typed shorthand. I was enchanted by her too. She was like a silent keyboardist, translating in real-time the verbal flow into a music score for posterity. And I wondered, even if stenographer’s shorthand uses just a single letter in place of a word, how could she keep up? (Stenographers, I subsequently learned, must pass stenography typing tests of 225 words per minute (!) and have the fortitude to deal with what would seem to be an element of tedium in their chosen métier.) But keep up she did and we the jury heard the constant gentle thumping of her fingers marking the passing seconds and minutes of the trial.

The performance of the trial as a whole had a rhythm too. Its tempo felt glacial (matching the frigid air-conditioned temperature of the room), change happening slowly and almost imperceptibly, noticed only at those turning points when someone new was called to the stand, say, or when a piece of verbal testimony seemed to clash with another bit heard earlier. Fortunately, there were verbal syncopations too that accented and broke up the otherwise glacial pace:

Defense: “ObJECTion your honor!”

Judge: “OverRULED!”

One could hear this as a syncopated call and response–

ba-DA-boom ba-DA-boom (call)

bada-BOOM (response)

–that happened many times, and each time opened with the same rhythm.

When matters warranted further discussion, the lawyers and the judge would huddle up by the judge’s perch, whispering quietly among themselves. It reminded me of an operatic recitative section, that moment where a character stops singing and starts talking in speech-like tones to convey a lot of information, except in this case, we the jury were not supposed to hear what was being whispered. Still, it was fun to try.

At the end of the trial we the jury read our verdict on the various charges. Or rather, our foreman read our verdict on behalf of all of us. At this point, I thought we were finally done, but the defense lawyer wanted a word with the judge. More huddling and whispered recitative up at the front of the room, then the judge turns to us and announces that we will be asked to repeat our verdict on one of the charges, only this time we will give the court our verdict individually.

Gulp.

It takes all of thirty seconds, but in that short time each of we the jury get our micro-moment as a musical soloist, uttering a single word of judgement for the ears of the judge, the lawyers, and the defendant. They want to hear our voices to make sure we’re all on the same page. In a way, all of our deliberations feel compressed into these little vocal solos: we are being asked to speak.

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May 3, 2012

Free Of All The World’s Heaviness: Karl Pilkington On Sound And Listening

I recently watched a few episodes of the animated HBO series, The Ricky Gervais Show (based on the popular audio podcast of the same name), on which Gervais and fellow comedian and writer Stephen Merchant chat with their perfectly round-headed friend Karl Pilkington on any topic they feel like just to hear what Karl might say. The voices of all three are engaging, but it’s that regular bloke Karl who steals the show.

Karl has a simple yet startlingly original take on life. Gervais and Merchant ask him for his opinion on a variety of topics with the aim of making fun of him, yet Karl always manages to surprise and elicit delight both because and despite what he says and the monotone way in which he says it. Karl’s voice is small, tentative, and deadpan, but he is always strangely thoughtful.

Here are some Karl Pilkington quotes that pertain to sound and listening:

“Normally you can’t hear you’re own voice because you’re talking over it.”

“They say it all started out with a big bang. But, what I wonder is, was it a big bang or did it just seem big because there wasn’t anything else to drown it out at the time?”

“Every noise has been used at least 5 times, because there’s only so many noises in the world. It’s like a piano, and there’s only so many notes. There’s just so much stuff, the same noises are being used again.”

“Noise stresses me out. I wonder if less deaf people die of stress than people with working ears do.”

“I might talk to some people on the phone, but then I get bored with that… About 5 minutes in, I realise I’m not listening anymore.”

“I’ve tried earplugs to drown out background noise. I didn’t like it ‘cause I could hear my heartbeat.”

“All I’m saying is, bird noises are relaxing…but not for the worm.”

“If you just talk, I find that your mouth comes out with stuff.”

“I mean, the whole beauty of radio is that you can listen to it in the dark.”

“You don’t whistle when you’re fed up. Whistling’s a happy thing.”

***

These videos are a little raunchy, but here’s a clip where Pilkington elaborates on his whistling practice:

And here is Pilkington on limits to the world’s noises:

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January 3, 2012

From The Hard Drive: Backing Up Old Voices

This is supposed to be a funny post.

As I was dutifully backing up and copying thousands of old files from a dusty desktop computer on New Year’s (I’m preparing to bury the computer in my closet—which, by the way, is starting to resemble one of those small cars out of which an implausible number of clowns are packed in), I came across an MP3 that made me laugh. The piece is called “Have You Any Thoughts.”  It’s part of a trio of compositions I wrote ten years ago based on voice messages left on my answering machine.

Does anyone remember answering machines?  The little plastic box kind that sat next to your phone?

“Have You Any Thoughts” features the talking voices of a few different folks who encountered music I had recorded onto my answering machine as a greeting message.  (I was trying to be cool.) I thought the music was okay–it was an excerpt from some electronic thing I had been working on–but the callers had varying opinions. This just goes to show how one set of sounds can inspire wildly different reactions in different listeners. It may also say something about the kinds of friends I keep.

There are a few humorous things about his piece. The voices are extracted from their initial contexts (the answering machine), their judgements–good, bad, or indifferent–revealed, sampled, and repeated. The voices are fun to listen to because each one captures a different kind of humor: unintentional humor, vicious humor, deadpan/dry humor, sarcastic humor, and plain strange, out-there humor. Each voice is sure of itself, sure of its perspective and what it’s saying, so juxtaposing all of the voices together heightens the overall humor quotient. The music I wrote around these voices is humorous too: you could call it cheesy, faux funk. All the parts–the piano, the organ, the drums, the horns, the twangy guitar–were played on a MIDI keyboard using generic preset sounds.

By the way, one of the voices on “Have You Any Thoughts”—the voice that asks, “Thoughts, have you any thoughts?” and then breaks out into spirited solfege singing—is that of my friend Fred, a teacher and ney player in Boston. To Fred’s credit, he’s figured out a way to use this music (as well as two other compositions of mine) as pedagogical tools in the college classroom to inspire discussions on voice, affect, humor, and other topics that only someone like Fred can conjure, taksim-like, out of thin air.

Here is the piece:

You can read more about the Answering Machine pieces here.

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July 18, 2011

On The Sound Of Your Voice

“Welcome to Times Square, Crossroads of the World. Have a great evening, and remember, whatever your final destination, happiness is the way.”
– voice of 7 Train operator, July 16, 2011

So it was the other day as I was getting off the 7 train at Times Square that I noticed the train conductor’s announcement going awry–but in a good way. He began by welcoming everyone to Times Square, then got philosophical (see the quote above) and presto! had everyone’s attention. How amazing, we thought to ourselves: a voice is actually talking to us, not just at us. This vignette would have been the end of this blog post, except that I had been thinking about voice for a few weeks, specifically the question of how our voices sound and reflect who we are.

Does anyone really like the sound of their own voice? Our voices seem so personal, so revealing because they’re intimately tied to our physiologies, that perhaps it’s hard to ever be totally at ease with them. And that old saying, he just likes the sound of his own voice, which we use to describe someone who is full of themselves–do they actually like the sound of their own voice? And if they do, is the saying right in implying that there’s someone wrong with such a person?

If our faces are, as Milan Kundera says, like our serial codes, then surely our voices must provide the appropriate–in fact, the only possible–musical accompaniment to this code? Do our voices always match our faces then? Can we deceive and be crooked with our voices while keeping a straight face? This year’s American Idol winner, seventeen year-old Scotty McCreery–he of the “surprisingly mature voice” as Entertainment Weekly noted–presents us with a young face out of which resonates a deep bass, older male country singer sound. Though he doesn’t mean to, Scotty deceives us a little because it feels like he’s channelling someone else: like a puppet for a vocal ventriloquist at work somewhere offstage. It’s a little creepy, actually.

Finally, does one’s writing voice reflect one’s speaking and singing voice? If yes, should it? Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece on his blog a few years ago about the importance of this very topic to him in terms of his writerly ethics. For Gladwell, good writing should sound like one’s speaking voice. If one’s writing voice is different from one’s speaking voice, from where then does it derive its tonality, its register and its cadence?

I leave you with a wonderful story recounted by the oral historian Studs Turkel. I think its wonderful for two reasons. The first being that the melody of Turkel’s voice itself has such clearly demarcated contours and an appealing graininess that even if you don’t speak English, you could probably well follow it. The other wonderful thing about the story is its simple narrative: a thinking person wondering aloud about the state of the human voice and meaningful communication in our contemporary world.

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May 13, 2011

On The Wellness Of Voice: Sounding Om

Yoga class.

The lights are off,
the dark space peaceful,
and we sit quietly on our mats,
legs crossed, hands prayed in front
of our chests –
Namaste.

With one unison breath
we chant Om
on a
single
unison
pitch–
centering and togetherness
through collective sound.

We’re a choir of Om.

But there’s a problem.

Some guy–there’s only a few of us guys in the class–
is way out of tune.

Like, way out of tune.

He chants a rogue note
about a flat major sixth below
the women’s voices
(and a flat third above mine)
and this deflated, nauseous tone
creates instant dissonance,
conflict
and tension.

The rogue chanter
clearly listens to his body,
follows his inner voice

but the rest of us
hear only his outer voice
tearing at our consonance,
a threat to our euphony.

So what to do?  What to do?

But no one says anything.

We’re too busy
chanting Om
and anyway,
warm up
is now over.

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February 28, 2011

On The American Singing Voice: American Idol, Glee and The Sing-Off

If you’ve been paying attention to popular TV shows you might have noticed how important the singing voice is to the North American popular culture moment we’re in.  Three shows in particular highlight the singing voice: American Idol (Fox), Glee (Fox), and The Sing-Off (NBC).  All of these shows remind us how powerful the singing voice is as a site for representing and constructing personal identity, social group cohesion, and a means of generating emotion, desire and affect out of the aether.

The mother of all singing competitions, American Idol, has been running for 10 years now, chronicling the discovery and manufacture of aspiring American pop singers.  On American Idol, the singing voice stands in boldest relief in the early days of each season, as singers audition a cappella for the judges.  Here we hear the unvarnished voices rendering parts of famous songs without the support of a backing band.  We hear voices trying to render a musical style–a rock voice, a gospel voice–through phrasing and dynamics and timbre (or tone “color”), this last quality being somewhat out of the singer’s total control.  In his book Image-Music-Text (1977), French literary critic Roland Barthes speaks of the “grain” of the voice to describe its particular quality and more:

“The ‘grain’ of the voice is not–or is not merely–its timbre; the significance it opens cannot better be defined, indeed, than by the very friction between the music and something else, which something else is the particular language (and unwise the message)” (185).

One the best ways to understand what makes a good singer is to hear a really bad one, or even just an average one.  The voice is such an infinitely flexible musical tool that when we hear it used in a compromised, less than optimal way, it reveals–or at least points towards–those intangibles that make for a great singing voice.  The differences are usually more than simple matters of intonation (Randy Jackson: “Uh, That was a little pitchy for me…”).  There is rhythmic phrasing, for instance, something not easy to do with only one’s own internal clock to go by.  And there is always that mysterious quality–Barthes’ “grain” of the voice?–which may in fact be the result of a whole bunch of qualities put together: the quality that lets us determine after a moment or two whether or not we’re moved enough to care.  Is this an authentic and true singing voice?

Put a bunch of singing voices together a Capella (sans backing band) and you have the premise of The Sing-Off, an American singing competition which made its debut in 2009.  Glee clubs date back to the Harrow School in England in the 1870s and have been mainstays on some American college campuses since around that time.  “Glee” refers not to the generally “happy” sound of these singing groups, but rather to the glee, an English part song popular from 1650 until about 1900 in England.

Because there is no band on The Sing-Off, some of the singers must fulfill an instrumental role–singing a bass part, beatboxing a drum kit, and so forth.  Here, musical blending is key, but so is the arrangement–that is, the ways in which the singers decide to render their song and divvy up the parts and divide their harmonies (not to mention the orchestration of the harmonies themselves: there are a lot of ways to voice a chord!).  In the midst of an electronic music-based popular music industry, the singing on The Sing-Off invigorates because it is so live, so acoustic, and so dependent on the performers listening closely to one another.

But if synthetic is your thing, look no further than Glee, a musical drama that also began in 2009.  In the Glee world, every singing voice is pristine, auto-tune perfect, and otherwise enhanced.  The Glee singers also benefit from a real world impossibility: whenever they sing in the classroom or onstage, a lush band sound magically arises behind them.  This is high-tech karaoke at its most highly mediated: you watch real singer-actors lip-syncing to their own pre-recorded vocal tracks of show tunes and contemporary hits.  The auto-tune and other sonic enhancements have reached the point of rendering the singers close to cyborgs in their perfection: not a note is out of place, befitting the airless milieu of the fictional high school where the show takes place.

The Glee recipe has revived many older pop songs, and Glee versions of them are released on the Apple iTunes store the week they’re featured in an episode. Thus, in an age of ever decreasing music sales, Glee recordings have sold many millions.  This is not just a function of mass marketing (though it is certainly that too), but rather a pandering to our collective memory/nostalgia for songs that have receded into the past (even if that past is a few months ago).  In this regard, Glee, The Sing-Off, and American Idol all have something in common by being elaborate apparatuses for reviving and giving new life to old music.

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