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Mark Porter (@mrmarkporter) explores the relationship between music, sound, space, and spirit in his new book Ecologies of Resonance in Christian Musicking (Oxford University Press, 2020). Using the analytical tools of resonance to describe the sounding and re-sounding of sonic production in different spaces, Porter uses the disciplines of musicology and ethnography to describe the worlds of relationships in an assortment of Christian musical traditions. How do the varieties of musicking from the desert monastics, to charismatic evangelicals, to live-streamed prayer rooms, among others, illustrate the different approaches of Christian musical participation? How might these different ecologies of resonance contribute toward ecumenical dialogue and understanding? Join us for a conversation with Mark Porter to hear about his excellent new study. You can find more information about Mark’s work at his website. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We so often take our senses as natural, but perhaps we should understand them as historically situated. Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke University Press, 2020) allows us to reconsider the history of psychophysics and psychology through the lens of sensory studies and to rethinking science in the context of racial capitalism. Breathing new life into nineteenth century psychophysics, Erica Fretwell presents a history of how science, technology, and literature came together to both reinforce and challenge racial boundaries. While each central chapter of Sensory Experiments deals with the recognized five senses, Fretwell also writes short intervals, or what she calls intervals, on the synthesis of particular senses (for instance, color and sound or mouthfeel). The synthesia assumed in these intervals challenge the hierarchy of senses often assumed by scientists during this time period. Through examining these scientific models of sense and sensitivity, Fretwell provides the reader with the nineteenth and early twentieth century evolutionary frameworks of Lamarckism and Darwinism, alongside Galton’s eugenics program. Fretwell contrasts these theories with psychophysics, including the spiritually motivated psychophysicist, Gustav Fechner, as well as many media and literature that focuses on sensitivity. Spirit photography provides one such example, a visual medium intended to provide some healing to family members who lost loved ones during the American Civil War. Through these images sight is transformed into a sense of loss; this was particularly the case for white bodies, which were more likely to have their pictures taken and more likely to be seen as “particularly capable of feeling loss.”To help us understand the racial politics of sound, Fretwell not only turns to the nascent field of psychoacoustics led by Hermann Helmholtz, but also the utopian fiction stories of Pauline Hopkins and Edward Bellamy. Each of these writers thought that differences in tonal sensitivity renders difference as racialized, and thus promoted segregated forms of social harmony from the most sensitive, civilized ear to the least sensitive, “primitive” ear. Meanwhile, inventions in chemistry and manufacturing of perfume performed functions of designating socially appropriate odors, which often segregated individuals by race and gender, while at other times challenging such segregation. In her taste chapter, Fretwell positions gastronomy and culinary science as ostensibly racial uplift projects. This can be further seen in Fretwell’s discussion of the racial framing of sweetness and black cake (the latter of which is taken up in the work of Emily Dickinson). In her penultimate chapter, Fretwell explores the relationality of touch through some of Helen Keller’s biography. While figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois thought that Keller could be an example of going beyond the sight of racial differences, as Fretwell points out, Keller, a deaf-blind woman, was actually attentive to the sensation of racial difference. In the Coda, Fretwell implores humanities and social science scholars to think about the historical dimensions of our sensory experiences. Overall, Sensory Experiments delivers a much needed history of senses that can provide important context for the racial politics of today. C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. CJ’s research interests include the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and digital wellness culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the relationship between race, technology and sound? How can we access the ways that Latin Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries thought about, and importantly, heard, race? In his book Audible Geographies in Latin America: Sounds of Race and Place (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Dylon Robbins approaches this question in a stunning series of chapters that move between Cuba and Brazil just as both nations were moving into post-emancipation and increasingly intense appeals to nationalist ideologies. New media such as the phonograph, as well as changing techniques in medicine and ethnography contributed to the complex entanglements of race, place and voice. Robbins uncovers new sites in which to explore these questions, such as the Experimental Phonetics Laboratory in Havana and revisits more familiar material, such as the work of Alejo Carpentier, with new frameworks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the twentieth century roared on, transformative technologies—from trains, trams, and automobiles to radios and loudspeakers—fundamentally changed the sounds of the Egyptian streets. The cacophony of everyday life grew louder, and the Egyptian press featured editorials calling for the regulation of not only mechanized and amplified sounds, but also the voices of street vendors, the music of wedding processions, and even the traditional funerary wails.In Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in Modern Egypt (Stanford University Press) Ziad Fahmy offers the first historical examination of the changing soundscapes of urban Egypt, highlighting the mundane sounds of street life, while "listening" to the voices of ordinary people as they struggle with state authorities for ownership of the streets.Interweaving infrastructural, cultural, and social history, Fahmy analyzes the sounds of modernity, using sounded sources as an analytical tool for examining the past. Street Sounds also reveals a political dimension of noise by demonstrating how the growing middle classes used sound to distinguish themselves from the Egyptian masses. This book contextualizes sound, layering historical analysis with a sensory dimension, bringing us closer to the Egyptian streets as lived and embodied by everyday people.This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.”Ziad Fahmy is a Professor of Modern Middle East History at Cornell University’s Department of Near Eastern studies.Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I discussed why music so powerful in eliciting emotions with Roger Kennedy, the author of The Power of Music: Psychoanalytic Explorations (Phoenix Publishing House, 2020)Now at The Child and Family Practice in London, Kennedy is a training analyst and past President of the British Psychoanalytical Society. This is his fourteenth book.Topics covered in this episode include: The ability of music to reward close listening because of qualities like movement and the web of interactions involved. How music can draw on and has parallels to a range of situations, like “baby talk” sounds shared by mother and child, and the sounds animals make (especially in mating rituals). Discussion of parallels between music and entering a dream state, rich with free association as opposed to a concrete, logically coherent “narrative” Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz.Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry’s challenges in the wake of the Great Depression.Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University.Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How have we used twentieth- and twenty-first-century sound technologies to carve out sonic space out of the hustle and bustle of contemporary life?In search for an answer, in this episode I speak with Mack Hagood, Blayney Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies at Miami University, writer, and podcaster about his book, Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control (Duke University Press, 2011).In Hush, Hagood examines a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century technologies of sonic self-control that includes nature recordings, clinical audiometric tools, and “sound conditioners” through to top-selling white noise apps and the noise-canceling headphones offered under the commercially succesfull Bose and Beats brands.What this assortment of tools and technologies have in common, Hagood argues, is that they are all “orphic media”: kinds of media that carry or generate content that is designed to efface itself as such. Orphic media can be understood as tactics and technologies that offer us respite from postmodern conditions of excess and distraction, even if that promise is not always fulfilled.Hagood draws on a variety of sources, including the results of his own ethnographic work, patent documents, and archival material, to develop a critical account of these media that—ironically—fight sound with yet more sound, one that is both grounded in the technical detail of how specific devices do this work and is sensitive to their various use-contexts, both actual and intended.Mack Hagood produces and hosts the Phantom Power podcast, an aural exploration of the sonic arts and humanities that launched in 2018 with the support of the Miami University Humanities Center and The National Endowment for the Humanities, and can be subscribed to wherever you get your podcasts.Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his book The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip-Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi (Duke University Press, 2020), Gabriel Dattatreyan departs from the existing literature on masculinity in India, which focuses on largely middle-class, upper-caste embodiments of the same. His focus is on non-elite, urban, lower caste/class embodiments of masculinity, in the context of globally familiar soundscpaes, images and aesthetics. There is an interesting way in which the author provides a nuanced understanding of the “other”, which takes into account the heterogeneity of those who are usually lumped together in the category of that “other”.The book provides not just caste, and regional contexts for these “working class” men but also lays out the generational shifts in the “aspirations” and future imagination of these young men. This futurization of urban participation then is highlighted in conversation with the official, policy and bureaucratized imaginations of the urban and urban Delhi in particular. In doing so, the “other” emerges as not just the passive recipient of the imaginations imposed on them by people in power but as being capable of refashioning and materially reimagining urban spaces as well. The internet and social media in particular emerge as critical sites of global engagement for the young men, who are Dattatreyan’s interlocutors and collaborators. Social media is not simply a site for getting familiar with and consuming that which is global but also the site for producing this familiarity in creative ways. It is through the labor of these young men taking immense pain to aesthetically re-produce the globally familiar that these circulations take on meaning. These re-creations and embodied re-productions also become sites of traversing newer and older forms of inequalities as well as creating political disruptions through the use hip-hop aesthetics.Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“What makes song sparrows, Verdi, medieval monks, and minstrelsy part of the same taxonomy?” So asks—and answers—Rachel Mundy, who is Assistant Professor of Music at Rutgers University–Newark. In her book, Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), Mundy shows how the history of the humanities is intimately connected with the lives of animals.Focusing on animal musicality, with a particular emphasis on birdsong, Mundy recounts dozens of twentieth-century encounters—in North America, Europe, and Africa—between animals and human researchers working in a variety of fields, work we now recognize as belonging to the disciplines of evolutionary biology, anthropology, ethology (the study of animal behavior), and ethnomusicology.Carefully attending to the value that was assigned to animal life in the lab and in the field, Mundy relates the story of how lives that were figured as non-human or less-than-human shape the received accounts of human and animal behavior in these disciplines. Crucially, the moral calculus that this research enacted has had lasting consequences for how all kinds of critical differences are figured in the contemporary postmodern humanities, including those of race, gender, class, and sexuality.Not only a collection of diverse and deeply-researched vignettes into the ethics of research into animal musicality during the long twentieth century, Mundy’s book culminates in a powerful and timely call for a reappraisal of the “human” at the heart of humanities and the human sciences at large.In this episode, we discuss the book and how it sketches the ambit of a notional field of the “animanities”: a new scholarly formation that problematises the long-standing reduction of life to a mere term in the exchange of animal vitality for human knowledge.Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We might call movies made before the advent of the talkies in 1927 silent films—but for the audience, they were certainly not silent. Live orchestras and solo instrumentalists accompanied early movies, adding evocative music drawn from pre-existent and newly composed sources.Kendra Preston Leonard, author of Music for the Kingdom of Shadows: Cinema Accompaniment in the Age of Spiritualism (Humanities Commons, 2010) examines the music and musicians that accompanied silent movies that she calls “spirit films” and along the way finds unexpected connections between film accompanists, mediums, and Spiritualism.A “spirit film”—unlike a horror movie—is a film that features the appearance of spirit or ghost who tries to warn the living of, or protect them from, a dangerous circumstance, often caused by business the spirit left unfinished at their death.White middle-class women were regularly employed as film accompanists and mediums, their gender and race contributing to the respectability of both Spiritualism and the cinema. Leonard documents that the music for these early films was influenced by sounds used by mediums during séances and those sonic signifiers continue to appear in film scores even today.Despite publishing four books and numerous essays in collected editions with conventional presses, Leonard chose to publish Music for the Kingdom of Shadows as an open-access book through Humanities Commons using a robust peer review process in order to increase the availability of her work.Kendra Preston Leonard is an independent musicologist and music theorist. She is the founder and executive Director of the Silent Film Sound and Music Archive. The author of five books, she has also received numerous fellowships including from the American Musicological Society and the Society for American Music. Her work centers on music and screen history, and women and music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Caribbean has figuratively and literally been entangled in processes of global integration earlier than other parts of the Americas.In Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC Press, 2016), Alejandra Bronfman offers a refreshing perspective to this well-trodden story. In this book, she traces the emergence and growth of telecommunications technologies in Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century.Bronfman examines the ways these new communication technologies often undermined rather than served as tools of domination for imperial forces—American or British.Most importantly, this book has us reconsider the role of sound and, specifically, radio broadcasting as central to political mobilization in ridding the region from empire.Alejandra Bronfman is Chair and Associate Professor, Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies, University of Albany.Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Thor Magnusson—musician, Professor of Future Music, and member of the Experimental Music Technologies Lab at the University of Sussex—provides a sweeping overview of the tools and techniques of music-making both before and after the dawn of computing as well a set of forward-looking strategies for thinking critically about our future relationship with new music technology. Importantly, Magnusson identifies many similarities between present and past sonic creative practices as he takes the reader through an impressive survey of music technologies spanning the analog–digital divide. Consistently thematising the act of writing throughout, Sonic Writing calls attention to the rich and continuous history of inscription practices such as staff notation, instrument building, phonographic sound recording, and programming digital synthesizer patches, practices that have been so intimately connected with the shared creation and enjoyment of music over its long and fruitful history.Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction.The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does music tell us about society? In Connecting Sounds: The Social Life of Music (Manchester University Press, 2020), Nick Crossley, Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, introduces a relational sociology of music. The book thinks through the social and individual practices of music, the music industry, and the music ‘worlds’ of mainstreams, alternatives, and subcultures. The book also considers music’s relation to inequalities, including of patterns of taste, politics, and the public sphere. As well as the sociological perspective, Connecting Sounds discusses the role of individuals, as they use music for meaning and sense of identity, and as practitioners and consumers. Packed with examples, as well as a rich range of theoretical discussions, the book is essential reading for social science and music scholars, as well as for anyone interested in the role of music in our social world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you.Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that.Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2018, Nicolle R. Holliday and Daniel Villarreal published the results of a study they conducted asking people to rank how “black” President Obama sounded when given four different examples of his speech. Dr. Nina Sun Eidsheim’s latest book, The Race of Sound: Listening Timbre and Vocality in African American Music (Duke University Press, 2019) explores the values, stereotypes, and cultural norms that underline such a question. Through examples ranging from black opera singers in the nineteenth century to user’s responses to the vocal synthesis technology called Vocaloid, Eidsheim sheds light on the ways that listeners invest racial and gendered meanings in vocal timbre. Contending that vocal timbre is an even stronger marker for race and gender than physical appearance, Eidsheim explores the consequences of and reasons for the cognitive dissonance caused by of the seeming “mismatch” between the bodies and vocal timbres of African American jazz singer Jimmy Scott and Norwegian child singer and Billie Holiday impersonator, Angelina Jordan. She takes on the significant political and social results of essentialized understandings of race, gender, age, and ethnicity that support cultural constructions of identity and investigates the central role vocal timbre plays in creating and reinforcing those ideas.Nina Sun Eidsheim is a Professor of Musicology in the Herb Alpert School of Music at the University of California at Los Angeles.Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices