Addressing topics from the conceptual voice as political agency to the disembodied obedience of digital assistants like Alexa, from the evolution of vocal perception to the birth of black radical argument, chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies respond to the age-old question: What is voice?

Speech perception has been the focus of innumerable studies over the past decades. While our abilities to recognize individuals by their voice state plays a central role in our everyday social interactions, limited scientific attention has been devoted to the perceptual and cerebral mechanisms underlying nonverbal information processing in voices. The Oxford Handbook of Voice Perception takes a comprehensive look at this emerging field and presents a selection of current research in voice perception. The forty chapters summarise the most exciting research from across several disciplines covering acoustical, clinical, evolutionary, cognitive, and computational perspectives. In particular, this handbook offers an invaluable window into the development and evolution of the 'vocal brain', and considers in detail the voice processing abilities of non-human animals or human infants. By providing a full and unique perspective on the recent developments in this burgeoning area of study, this text is an important and interdisciplinary resource for students, researchers, and scientific journalists interested in voice perception.

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.

Speech perception has been the focus of innumerable studies over the past decades. While our abilities to recognize individuals by their voice state plays a central role in our everyday social interactions, limited scientific attention has been devoted to the perceptual and cerebral mechanisms underlying nonverbal information processing in voices. The Oxford Handbook of Voice Perception takes a comprehensive look at this emerging field and presents a selection of current research in voice perception. The forty chapters summarise the most exciting research from across several disciplines covering acoustical, clinical, evolutionary, cognitive, and computational perspectives. In particular, this handbook offers an invaluable window into the development and evolution of the 'vocal brain', and considers in detail the voice processing abilities of non-human animals or human infants. By providing a full and unique perspective on the recent developments in this burgeoning area of study, this text is an important and interdisciplinary resource for students, researchers, and scientific journalists interested in voice perception.

Now in its sixth decade, country music studies is a thriving field of inquiry involving scholars working in the fields of American history, folklore, sociology, anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, and geography, among many others. Covering issues of historiography and practice as well as the ways in which the genre interacts with media and social concerns such as class, gender, and sexuality, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music interrogates prevailing narratives, explores significant lacunae in the current literature, and provides guidance for future research. More than simply treating issues that have emerged within this subfield, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music works to connect to broader discourses within the various fields that inform country music studies in an effort to strengthen the area's interdisciplinarity. Drawing upon the expertise of leading and emerging scholars, this Handbook presents an introduction into the historiographical narratives and methodological issues that have emerged in country music studies' first half-century.

As the landscape of choral education changes - disrupted by Glee, YouTube, and increasingly cheap audio production software - teachers of choral conducting need current research in the field that charts scholarly paths through contemporary debates and sets an agenda for new critical thought and practice. Where, in the digitizing world, is the field of choral pedagogy moving? Editor Frank Abrahams and Paul D. Head, both experienced choral conductors and teachers, offer here a comprehensive handbook of newly-commissioned chapters that provide key scholarly-critical perspectives on teaching and learning in the field of choral music, written by academic scholars and researchers in tandem with active choral conductors. As chapters in this book demonstrate, choral pedagogy encompasses everything from conductors' gestures to the administrative management of the choir. The contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Choral Pedagogy address the full range of issues in contemporary choral pedagogy, from repertoire to voice science to the social and political aspects of choral singing. They also cover the construction of a choral singer's personal identity, the gendering of choral ensembles, social justice in choral education, and the role of the choral art in society more generally. Included scholarship focuses on both the United States and international perspectives in five sections that address traditional paradigms of the field and challenges to them; critical case studies on teaching and conducting specific populations (such as international, school, or barbershop choirs); the pedagogical functions of repertoire; teaching as a way to construct identity; and new scholarly methodologies in pedagogy and the voice.

Singing has been a characteristic behaviour of humanity across several millennia. Chorus America (2009) estimated that 42.6 million adults and children regularly sing in one of 270,000 choruses in the US, representing more than 1:5 households. Similarly, recent European-based data suggest that more than 37 million adults take part in group singing. The Oxford Handbook of Singing is a landmark text on this topic. It is a comprehensive resource for anyone who wishes to know more about the pluralistic nature of singing. In part, the narrative adopts a lifespan approach, pre-cradle to senescence, to illustrate that singing is a commonplace behaviour which is an essential characteristic of our humanity. In the overall design of the Handbook, the chapter contents have been clustered into eight main sections, embracing fifty-three chapters by seventy-two authors, drawn from across the world, with each chapter illustrating and illuminating a particular aspect of singing. Offering a multi-disciplinary perspective embracing the arts and humanities, physical, social and clinical sciences, the book will be valuable for a broad audience within those fields.

Despite its importance as a central feature of musical sounds, timbre has rarely stood in the limelight. First defined in the eighteenth century, denigrated during the nineteenth, the concept of timbre came into its own during the twentieth century and its fascination with synthesizers and electronic music-or so the story goes. But in fact, timbre cuts across all the boundaries that make up musical thought-combining scientific and artistic approaches to music, material and philosophical aspects, and historical and theoretical perspectives. Timbre challenges us to fundamentally reorganize the way we think about music. The twenty-five essays that make up this collection offer a variety of engagements with music from the perspective of timbre. The boundaries are set as broad as possible: from ancient Homeric sounds to contemporary sound installations, from birdsong to cochlear implants, from Tuvan overtone singing to the tv show The Voice, from violin mutes to Moog synthesizers. What unifies the essays across this vast diversity is the material starting point of the sounding object. This focus on the listening experience is radical departure from the musical work that has traditionally dominated musical discourse since its academic inception in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Timbre remains a slippery concept that has continuously demanded more, be it more precise vocabulary, a more systematic theory, or more rigorous analysis. Rooted in the psychology of listening, timbre consistently resists pinning complete down. This collection of essays provides an invitation for further engagement with the range of fascinating questions that timbre opens up.

Featuring roughly sixty specially commissioned essays by an international cast of leading rhetoric experts from North America, Europe, and Great Britain, the Handbook will offer readers a comprehensive topical and historical survey of the theory and practice of rhetoric from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment up to the present day.

The Oxford Handbook of Children's Musical Cultures is a compendium of perspectives on children and their musical engagements as singers, dancers, players, and avid listeners. Over the course of 35 chapters, contributors from around the world provide an interdisciplinary enquiry into the musical lives of children in a variety of cultures, and their role as both preservers and innovators of music. Drawing on a wide array of fields from ethnomusicology and folklore to education and developmental psychology, the chapters presented in this handbook provide windows into the musical enculturation, education, and training of children, and the ways in which they learn, express, invent, and preserve music. Offering an understanding of the nature, structures, and styles of music preferred and used by children from toddlerhood through childhood and into adolescence, The Oxford Handbook of Children's Musical Cultures is an important step forward in the study of children and music.