MUSIC IN REVIEW

1 7 0 Y M U S I C I N R E V I E W M A R I T M A C A R T H U R In everyday life and through the mediation of technology, we constantly listen to voices without being able to see the person vocalizing. As a practical matter, we may ask, Who is this? Whether or not we ask the question out loud, we think about it, and other questions ramify from it. Do I know this person? How old is he or she? What is this person’s gender? Race? Ethnicity? Class? Educational background? Is the person a native speaker of this language? Where is he or she from? What does the tone of voice imply about the person’s emotional state? Can I trust him or her? And so on. For the musicologist and classically trained singer Nina Sun Eidsheim, Who is this? is the wrong question – primarily, but not only, because we so often and with unwarranted confidence answer it in terms of essentialist racial, ethnic, gender, and other categories. That is, distinct sounds made by individual voices are reductively attributed to racial, ethnic or gender di√erences: ‘‘DifT h e R a c e o f S o u n d : L i s t e n i n g , T i m b r e , a n d V o c a l i t y i n A f r i c a n A m e r i c a n M u s i c , by Nina Sun Eidsheim (Duke University Press, 288 pp. $25.95 paper) S e n s i n g S o u n d : S i n g i n g a n d L i s t e n i n g a s V i b r a t i o n a l P r a c t i c e , by Nina Sun Eidsheim (Duke University Press, 288 pp., $24.95 paper) 1 7 1 R ference is imagined as race.’’ Eidsheim frames The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music with a convincing critique of the question Who is this? She calls it the acousmatic question, after Pierre Schae√er (who derives the root of acousmatic from ‘‘an ancient Greek legend about Pythagoras’s disciples listening to him through a curtain’’), and argues that it relies on fundamental misunderstandings of the human voice and our own listening practices, particularly in regard to vocal timbre. And what is vocal timbre? ‘‘Everything except pitch and loudness ’’ is Eidsheim’s paraphrase of the American National Standards Institute’s definition. It’s that seemingly indefinable quality that makes the voices of Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Scott, Billie Holiday, and Emmylou Harris immediately recognizable , except – and this is a major point of Eidsheim’s argument in The Race of Sound – that the timbre so closely identified with a distinctive vocalizer, such as Holiday, can be convincingly imitated , for instance by a seven-year-old girl of Middle Eastern ethnic background growing up in Norway. More about that later. Every human being has a unique vocal tract. Its size and length (which correlate with biological sex at birth) help determine the tessitura, or comfortable vocal range, of a given vocalizer, and factors like age and health also have an influence. However, as Eidsheim emphasizes, an individual human voice can be trained to make an almost infinite range of sounds. And if a person of a particular race sounds, to those listening, like an auditory stereotype of another race, he or she may be censured, as when Ralph Nader characterized Barack Obama as ‘‘talking white’’ in 2008. (This is one of the epigraphs to the introduction to The Race of Sound.) To the acousmatic question, Eidsheim o√ers three correctives: ‘‘Voice is not singular; it is collective ‘‘; ‘‘voice is not innate; it is cultural’’; and ‘‘voice’s source is not the singer; it is the listener.’’ That is, we are all trained throughout our lives, whenever we vocalize and someone makes comments about our voice, to then adjust it...