About this book
Takes critical and theoretical approaches to singing across audiovisual media
- Explores ways in which singing has been used and understood across audiovisual media platforms
- Takes diverse and international approach to understanding the voice
- Emphasises issues of identity, technology, and the identifying markers of the voice itself
Singing Out explores a broad range of singing voices and sung moments, from lavish film musical sequences, television and videogames, through to online platforms, advertising, and multimedia installation work. It illustrates the diverse ways in which the singing voice is produced and understood in different media across international contexts, taking into consideration issues such as corporeal form, age, race, reception, and gender.
The act of singing emphasises issues of identity, technology, and the identifying markers of the voice itself, heightening communication, acting as an aid to memory, and inviting judgement. Singing demarcates and breaks down textual and conceptual boundaries, and offers an intensity of experience that gives it a special status on the soundtrack.
Singing Out contains a range of approaches to the singing voice, offering students and researchers a variety of methodological and critical tools to understand the contemporary context and importance of singing in multimedia.
Reviews
From the first page, this collection sings! Carroll and Haworth have expertly edited a collection that is a necessary addition to numerous academic discourses, such as the musical, sound and voice studies, and one of the few sustained studies into singing in audio-visual media. Singing Out offers fascinating explorations about the body, stardom, technology and liveness through a range of perspectives on singing in reactions videos, biographical television dramas, performance art, video games and advertisements. Each chapter is unique in focus, but all share a rigorous approach to singing as worthy object of study, becoming a chorus of voices that hit all the right notes.
Table of contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Beth Carroll and Catherine Haworth
Part I. Stardom and The Singing Body
1. Bearer of All Things: Black Women’s Voices in 20th Century American Popular Music
Abigail Lindo
2. A Voice Too Much: Performance, Authenticity and Nostalgia in Biographical Television Drama Hannah Andrews and Leanne Weston
3. Super-Natural: Television Singing, the Special Guest Star and Stevie Nicks in American Horror Story (2011-)
Catherine Haworth
Part II. Voices, Commerce and Consumption
4. Singalong Advertising: Imagined Communities of Consumption
Malcolm Cook
5. Auto-tuning Hannah Montana: Miley Cyrus’s Child Voice and the Technological Subversion of Girlhood
Liam Maloy
6. Where Voice and Body Meet Again: Punjabi Rappers in Bollywood Music Videos
Julia Szivak
Part III. The Singing Voice as Transformation
7. On Screen, on Stage, in Live Performance: Songs and Singing in Sister Act
Ian Sapiro
8. Kinshasa’s Music, Dreams and Shared Cinematic Realities: Listening to Vocal Performance in Félicité (2017)
Chris Letcher
9. ‘But the right words, never come’: Transformative Identities, Female Agency and Performance in Sayonara Wild Hearts
Jennifer Smith
Part IV. Singing, Technology and Mediation
10. ‘We don’t have that’: Representation of Hindustani Classical Vocal Performance in YouTube Reaction Videos
Irina Mironova
11. ‘I see Marina, but feel Maria’: Marina Abramović’s Mediation of Callas’s Voice
Lea Luka Sikau
12. The World is Mine: Queer Affective Horizons in the Vocaloid Pop of Hatsune Miku
Shelina Brown
References
Index