Nina Sun Eidsheim, "The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocality in African American Music" (Duke UP, 2019)

New Books in African American Studies · Nov 4, 2019 · 1h 9m

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…