The Unseen Voice


Book Description

Images of the golden age of wireless and family life before the age of television have widespread currency. Their dominance raises fundamental questions about the extent to which people’s memories of early radio and everyday pre-war life are shaped and mediated by these public histories. For geographical reasons radio has played an unusually important part in twentieth-century Australian life and culture. Australian radio must therefore stand as a major example in the study of the medium. This book, first published in 1988, examines the early history of Australian radio, looking at the beginnings of radio itself and at the ways in which cultural tasks were determined for it. This is a detailed analysis of radio discourse and the construction of audiences, drawing on a range of theoretical material to examine questions about the production and dynamics of popular culture, the relationship between politics and everyday life, and the changes brought about in women’s lives.




Lipsynching


Book Description

What does it mean when a singing voice is detached from an originating body through recording? And how does this affect consumers of recorded song? This book examines the practice of lipsynching to pre-recorded song in both professional and vernacular contexts, covering over a century of diverse artistic practices from early cinema through to the current popularity of self-produced internet lipsynching videos. It examines the ways in which we listen to, respond to, and use recorded music, not only as a commodity to be consumed but as a culturally-sophisticated and complex means of identification, a site of projection, introjection, and habitation, and, through this, a means of personal and collective creativity.




Lacan


Book Description

The giant of Ljubljana marshals some of the greatest thinkers of our age in support of a dazzling re-evaluation of Jacques Lacan.




The Late Voice


Book Description

Popular music artists, as performers in the public eye, offer a privileged site for the witnessing and analysis of ageing and its mediation. The Late Voice undertakes such an analysis by considering issues of time, memory, innocence and experience in modern Anglophone popular song and the use by singers and songwriters of a 'late voice'. Lateness here refers to five primary issues: chronology (the stage in an artist's career); the vocal act (the ability to convincingly portray experience); afterlife (posthumous careers made possible by recorded sound); retrospection (how voices 'look back' or anticipate looking back); and the writing of age, experience, lateness and loss into song texts. There has been recent growth in research on ageing and the experience of later stages of life, focusing on physical health, lifestyle and psychology, with work in the latter field intersecting with the field of memory studies. The Late Voice seeks to connect age, experience and lateness with particular performers and performance traditions via the identification and analysis of a late voice in singers and songwriters of mid-late twentieth century popular music.




A Blaze of Light in Every Word


Book Description

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.




The Sense of Sound


Book Description

The Sense of Sound is a radical recontextualization of French song, 1260-1330. Situating musical sound against sonorities of the city, madness, charivari, and prayer, it argues that the effect of verbal confusion popular in music abounds with audible associations, and that there was meaning in what is often heard as nonsensical.




Between Opera and Cinema


Book Description

Leading scholars of opera and film explore the many ways these two seemingly unrelated genres have come together from the silent-film era to today.




An Empty Life


Book Description

Barry has a hard time moving forward in life. He desperately holds onto the past when he was a child and the truth about the world was hidden. He believed in love, he believed in peace, and he believed in his dreams but once his childhood was over everything had changed or everything had stopped lying to him. The world appeared empty and he refused to be a part of the emptiness. The more time goes by the less real the world appears to him and the less time he has in finding true love and true happiness.




Emergency Broadcasting and 1930s American Radio


Book Description

The voice we hear on the radio—the voice with no body attached—is a key element in the history of media in the twentieth century. Before television and the internet, there was radio; and much of what defined the makeup of these newer media was influenced by the way radio was broadcast to people and the way people listened to it.Emergency Broadcastingfocuses on key moments in the history of early radio in order to come to an understanding of the role voice played in radio to describe national crises, a fictional invasion from outer space, and general entertainment. Taking the Hindenburg disaster,The War of the Worldshoax, Franklin Roosevelt's Fireside Chats, and the serial mysteryThe Shadowas his focal points, Edward Miller illustrates how the radio, for the first time, instantly communicated to a mass audience, and how that communication—where the voice counts more than the image—is still at work today in television and the World Wide Web. Theoretically sophisticated, yet grounded in historical detail,Emergency Broadcastingoffers a unique examination of radio and at the same time develops a complex understanding of the media whose birth is owed to the innovations—and disembodied power—established by it. Author note:Edward D. Milleris Chair of the Department of Media Culture at The College of Staten Island/CUNY.




Lone Pine


Book Description