Singing the Body Electric explores the relationship between the human voice and technology, offering startling insights into the ways in which technological mediation affects our understanding of the voice, and more generally, the human body. From the phonautograph to magnetic tape and now to digital sampling, Miriama Young visits particular musical and literary works that define a century-and-a-half of recorded sound. She discusses the way in which the human voice is captured, transformed or synthesised through technology. This includes the sampled voice, the mechanical voice, the technologically modified voice, the pliable voice of the digital era, and the phenomenon by which humans mimic the sounding traits of the machine. The book draws from key electro-vocal works spanning a range of genres - from Luciano Berio's Thema: Omaggio a Joyce to Radiohead, from Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room, to Björk, and from Pierre Henry's Variations on a Door and a Sigh to Christian Marclay's Maria Callas. In essence, this book transcends time and musical style to reflect on the way in which the machine transforms our experience of the voice. The chapters are interpolated by conversations with five composers who work creatively with the voice and technology: Trevor Wishart, Katharine Norman, Paul Lansky, Eduardo Miranda and Bora Yoon. This book is an interdisciplinary enterprise that combines music aesthetics and musical analysis with literature and philosophy.

Singing the Body Electric explores the relationship between the human voice and technology, offering startling insights into the ways in which technological mediation affects our understanding of the voice, and more generally, the human body. From the phonautograph to magnetic tape and now to digital sampling, Miriama Young visits particular musical and literary works that define a century-and-a-half of recorded sound. She discusses the way in which the human voice is captured, transformed or synthesised through technology. This includes the sampled voice, the mechanical voice, the technologically modified voice, the pliable voice of the digital era, and the phenomenon by which humans mimic the sounding traits of the machine. The book draws from key electro-vocal works spanning a range of genres - from Luciano Berio's Thema: Omaggio a Joyce to Radiohead, from Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room, to Björk, and from Pierre Henry's Variations on a Door and a Sigh to Christian Marclay's Maria Callas. In essence, this book transcends time and musical style to reflect on the way in which the machine transforms our experience of the voice. The chapters are interpolated by conversations with five composers who work creatively with the voice and technology: Trevor Wishart, Katharine Norman, Paul Lansky, Eduardo Miranda and Bora Yoon. This book is an interdisciplinary enterprise that combines music aesthetics and musical analysis with literature and philosophy.

Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s most celebrated collaboration, the landmark opera Einstein on the Beach, had its premiere at the Avignon Festival in 1976. During its initial European tour, Metropolitan Opera premiere, and revivals in 1984 and 1992, Einstein provoked opposed reactions from both audiences and critics. Today, Einstein is well on the way itself to becoming a canonized avant-garde work, and it is widely acknowledged as a profoundly significant moment in the history of opera or musical theater. Einstein created waves that for many years crashed against the shores of traditional thinking concerning the nature and creative potential of audiovisual expression. Reaching beyond opera, its influence was felt in audiovisual culture in general: in contemporary avant-garde music, performance art, avant-garde cinema, popular film, popular music, advertising, dance, theater, and many other expressive, commercial, and cultural spheres. Inspired by the 2012–2015 series of performances that re-contextualized this unique work as part of the present-day nexus of theoretical, political, and social concerns, the editors and contributors of this book take these new performances as a pretext for far-reaching interdisciplinary reflection and dialogue. Essays range from those that focus on the human scale and agencies involved in productions to the mechanical and post-human character of the opera’s expressive substance. A further valuable dimension is the inclusion of material taken from several recent interviews with creative collaborators Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, and Lucinda Childs, each of these sections comprising knee plays, or short intermezzo sections resembling those found in the opera Einstein on the Beach itself. The book additionally features a foreword written by the influential musicologist and cultural theorist Susan McClary and an interview with film and theater luminary Peter Greenaway, as well as a short chapter of reminiscences written by the singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega.

Like race, gender, and sexuality, disability is a social and cultural construction. Music, musicians, and music-making simultaneously embody and shape representations and narratives of disability. Disability -- culturally stigmatized minds and bodies -- is one of the things that music in all times and places can be said to be about.

Heather Lyle's Vocal Yoga, the Joy of Breathing Singing and Sounding is the first book of its kind synthesizing techniques from Yoga, pranayama, Tai Chi, Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, The Bel Canto School of Singing, Sanskrit chanting, classical speech training and jazz improvisation, to unblock the breath and free the voice. Vocal Yoga contains 100 exercises that promote vocal freedom, resonance, and power, and help you uncover tension that might be hindering your voice and creative expression. Whether you are a singer, actor, yogi or public speaker, you will gain a better understanding of your voice and how to become one with it. Look in Amazon's MP3 store under Heather Lyle to purchase Lyle's double CD: VOCAL YOGA SINGING EXERCISES. 44 vocal exercises to improve your voice!

The human singing voice holds immense power - to convey mood, emotion, and identity in songs, provide music's undeniable "wow" moments, and communicate a pop song's meaning perhaps more than any other musical parameter. And unlike the other aspects of musical content - like harmony, form, melody, and rhythm, for which generations of scholars have formed sophisticated analyses - scholarly approaches to vocal delivery remain grossly underdeveloped. An exciting and much-needed new approach, A Blaze of Light in Every Word presents a systematic and encompassing conceptual model for analyzing vocal delivery. Author Victoria Malawey focuses on three overlapping areas of inquiry - pitch, prosody, and quality - while drawing on research from music theory and pedagogy as well as gender studies and philosophy to situates the sonic and material aspects of vocal delivery among broader cultural, philosophical, and anthropological approaches to voice. Malawey develops a much-needed and innovative set of analytical tools through in-depth analyses of popular song recordings in genres spanning from hip hop to death metal. A Blaze of Light in Every Word brings new clarity to the relationship between the voice's sonic content and its greater signification, helping us understand the complexity and uniqueness of singing voices.

Digital technology has profoundly transformed almost all aspects of musical culture. This book explains how and why.