Department of Music
The Race of Sound: The Acousmatic Question as Voice-Making
Professor Nina Sun Eidsheim
University of California, Los Angeles
Date: Wednesday, 23 October 2019, 5:00pm
Venue: Seminar Room 11.01, 11/F Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Abstract:
The foundational question raised in listening to a human voice is: Who is this? Who is speaking? This is an acousmatic question that asks what type of essence is sounding. This talk asserts that we ask the acousmatic question because it is not actually possible to know voice, vocal identity, and meaning as such; we can only know them in their multidimensional processes, practices, and multiplicities. In this talk, I share tools that help denaturalize the acousmatic listening process and the voices it names. Drawing from musicology, ethnomusicology, African American-, race-, sound- and voice studies, I provide a framework that can help us critically examine how race is “measured” through sound, and how the authenticity of race and racial subjectivities is often located in vocal timbre. More broadly, I hope this work can contribute to a knowledge of the ways in which comprehending voice remains central to understanding human experience.
About the Speaker:
Nina Sun Eidsheim is Professor of Musicology at UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. She is the author of Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Duke UP, 2015) and The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (Duke UP, December 2019). She coedited the Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies (2019) and is the co-editor (with Josh Kun and Ronald Radano) of the Refiguring American Music book series for Duke University Press. She is an inaugural member and Co-Chair for the American Musicological Society Committee on Race and Ethnicity. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation Fellowship, Cornell University Society of the Humanities Fellowship, the UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowship, and the ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship. Nina is currently collaborating on a book and performance project with composer and trumpet player Wadada Leo Smith.
All welcome.
For enquiry, please contact the Department of Music at 3917-7045 or music@hku.hk.