Bonnie Gordon, "Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

New Books in Technology · Aug 31, 2023 · 57m

Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Constructed through surgical alteration and further modified by rigorous training, castrati inhabited human bodies that had been “mechanized” to produce sounds in ways that unmechanized bodies could not. The voices of these technologically enhanced singers, with their unique timbre, range, and strength, contributed to a dramatic expansion of musical vocabulary and prompted new ways of imagining sound, the body…