Jacob Smith, Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media

摘要

Vocality is a rather neglected quality in communicating. This is surprising when you consider the multifarious features of the human voice, at once an integral component of individual identity and a major vehicle of social interaction and cornmunality. We use our voices to speak, sing, sigh, laugh, lie and lash out. Jacob Smith's study of vocal performance styles will help to overcome this neglect. He is specifically interested in how such media as phonograph records, film, radio and television have helped shape and develop such styles. It is not only the technological mediation of voice and vocality that is involved. These media also, for the first time, brought about a temporal and spatial separation of vocal performance and the auditors of that performance. They also conveyed and preserved intonation, nuances of expression and the grain of the voice in new ways.