Page - 50 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

50 | Florian Heesch www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 49–69 The singing voice, it seems, is more connected to the human body than is any other musical sound. It is produced with body movements only, mainly inside the body, and as a result of using many smaller and larger body parts, including physical cavities, the voice is characteristic of the individual person and his or her body. Roland Barthes expressed that relationship vividly in his path-breaking essay “The Grain of the Voice”, in which he stated that perceiving the “grain”, which is “the body in the voice as it sings”, is “to listen to my relation with the body of the man or woman singing or play- ing and that relation is erotic”.1 However, it would be misleading to think of today’s human voices as a resort of “natural” or even “primordial” sounds. On the contrary, speech and singing, like any other bodily action, interact constantly with the culture we live in, including its notions and knowledge about vocal identities (for instance, how male and female voices sound) and the versatile and inescapable interactions with technology (for instance, in telephone conversations or in listening to radio, tel- evision, or online video clips). Most of the musical voices we listen to today arrive in our ears not directly from other bodies but from technological devices like speakers or headphones, and in many cases these sounds are not only transmitted but also transformed by technology. The musical voice as a hybrid of bodily and technological sounds is in particular connected to the history and culture of Euro-American popular music. Popular mu- sic as a mass-culture phenomenon is based on the development of sound recording and distribution through the gramophone around 1900; the younger phenomenon of popular music as youth culture, the occurrence of “pop” with an emphatic meaning, was facilitated by the development and marketing of relatively affordable devices like the transistor radio and lighter variants of the turntable.2 Young people were enabled to listen to their musical idols, even if they could not afford to attend their concerts. As listening to radio programmes, records, and, later, video clips became a crucial part of popular music culture, people became used to listening to electronically transmit- ted and transformed voices. This technological hybridity of the musical voice can be described as no less than the standard in popular music. Still, one of the basic questions raised by listening to popular song is directed at the singing subject. Whose voice is it? The musicologist Allan Moore emphasises that the identity of the singer is generally the aspect with which people are principally con- cerned as they listen to a track and therefore “the central aspect of the interpretive process”3; put another way, that very identity plays a key role in any hermeneutic ap- proach to recorded popular song. It is important to note that Moore approaches the identity of the singer carefully, by introducing the concept of persona, an “artificial construction that may, or may not, be identical with the person(ality) of the singer”, 1 Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice”, in Barthes 1977, 182. 2 For a detailed overview of these large socio-musical developments see e.g. Middleton 1990, chapter entitled “Forces and relations of production (II)”; Wicke 2001. 3 Moore 2012, 178.