Description
Book SynopsisThrough an analysis of four contemporary operas, Nina Sun Eidsheim offers a vibrational theory of music that radically re-envisions of how we think about sound, music, and listening by challenging common assumptions about sound, freeing it from a constraining set of fixed concepts and meanings.
Trade Review"Even if we consider 'the voice' as a sound source, in an average personal imaginary ‘sound’ is something external, while 'the voice' is something internal and intimate. If we add to that the extreme power of language, it’s even harder to treat the voice as 'sound.' Eidsheim explores these contradictions in her book with knowledge and vision. Her theory of sound as a 'universal connection of entities,' for example, is simply enrapturing...." -- Aurelio Cianciotta * Neural *
"Eidsheim’s formulation of music as vibrational practice engenders new ways of considering communication between singer and audience, environment and body, and animate and inanimate materials. ... Her work generates wide-ranging and pragmatic resonances for those interested in questions surrounding sound and multi-sensory experience." -- Amy Skjerseth * Theatre Research International *
"[Eidsheim's] book invites readers to remember that music itself is a complex phenomenon better understood as an experience and practice of 'intermaterial vibration.'" -- Cecilia Livingston * Cambridge Opera Journal *
“
Sensing Sound is a captivating and rewarding book. Eidsheim’s ‘vibrational practice’ provides a liberating take on vocal sound, and one that can be applied not only to singing and listening, but to many dimensions of sensory experience.” -- Rebecca Lentjes * Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies *
“No doubt [
Sensing Sound] will become required reading in many academic disciplines that touch on voice studies.” -- Marit MacArthur * Yale Review *
“
Sensing Sound delivers a provocative theory of musical sonority—one that interrogates the participatory, material, and experiential dimensions of music-making in new and exciting ways. . . .
Sensing Sound is sure to enliven music and sound studies research for years to come.” -- Daniel Akira Stadnicki * Intersections *
“Eidsheim’s book is sensitive to bodies, attentive to physics, and mindful of encultured practices of listening and sounding. It is a much-needed meeting point for musicology, sound studies, philosophy of sound, performance studies, vocal pedagogy, and those interested in theorizing difference in music.” -- Lucie Vágnerová * Current Musicology *
Table of ContentsIllustrations viii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. Music's Material Dependency: What Underwater Opera Can Tell Us about Odysseus's Ears 27
2. The Acoustic Mediation of Voice, Self, and Others 58
3. Music as Action: Singing Happens before Sound 95
4. All Voice, All Ears: From the Figure of Sound to the Practice of Music 132
5. Music as a Vibrational Practice: Singing and Listening as Everything and Nothing 154
Notes 187
Bibliography 241
Index 261
