Down with Disembodiment; or, Musicology and the Material Turn

Watkins, Holly; Esse, Melina

doi:10.1353/wam.2015.0006

Cited by 43 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 9 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…While the fact that singing voices can be expressively smiling, trembling or screaming may not appear surprising from a naturalistic, biological point of view, and is in accordance with comparative acoustic analyses of emotion production in speech and singing [42], it strongly contrasts with an 'artificialistic' view, prevalent for instance in the musicology of the great virtuoso performers of the nineteenth century [47], of singing voice as a disembodied musical instrument bearing no natural relation to the singer's body [48]. The present results suggest, on the contrary, that singing and non-vocal musical sounds can both be processed as if they were spoken voice, mobilizing cognitive mechanisms linked to the detection and interpretation of physiological phenomena.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 68%

Even violins can cry: specifically vocal emotional behaviours also drive the perception of emotions in non-vocal music

Bedoya

Arias

Rachman

et al. 2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A wealth of theoretical and empirical arguments have suggested that music triggers emotional responses by resembling the inflections of expressive vocalizations, but have done so using low-level acoustic parameters (pitch, loudness, speed) that, in fact, may not be processed by the listener in reference to human voice. Here, we take the opportunity of the recent availability of computational models that allow the simulation of three specifically vocal emotional behaviours: smiling, vocal tremor and vocal roughness. When applied to musical material, we find that these three acoustic manipulations trigger emotional perceptions that are remarkably similar to those observed on speech and scream sounds, and identical across musician and non-musician listeners. Strikingly, this not only applied to singing voice with and without musical background, but also to purely instrumental material. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)’.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 68%