Seite - 53 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 02/01
Bild der Seite - 53 -
Text der Seite - 53 -
Voicing the Technological Body |
53www.jrfm.eu
2016, 2/1, 49–69
of presence and for presence as an aesthetic category. To that extent, my use of the
term “presence” extends that of Ong.
In the following I will argue that the historic development of recorded popular
song includes relationships between body and technology that can be described
alongside concepts of presence, absence, and hybridity. These concepts will prepare
the ground for systematic categories of phenomena of voicing technological bodies
in the history of popular music: (1) absence of the body: recorded voices, (2) ampli-
fied presence: microphonic bodies, and (3) hybrid identities: vocoders and other tech-
nologies of vocal transformation. In my view, this classification extends beyond the
too-familiar borders between, for example, rock and pop, pop and popular music,
even popular and classical music. I approach that field through observations on select
pieces from the history of popular music, from early twentieth-century schlager to
today’s pop music by Lady Gaga. The approach via examples illustrates genre-crossing
and, furthermore, allows me to include close readings (with a focus on the recent
example of Lady Gaga) that can shed light on how a hermeneutic approach to such
phenomena might work.
ABSENCE OF THE BODY: RECORDED VOICES
Strictly speaking, the history of the absence of the singing body in music due to tech-
nology starts with the transcription of song. Although that aspect is too complex
to be dealt with comprehensively in this article, it is important to keep in mind that
scholars and music publishers were already collecting traditional songs such as Afri-
can American spirituals in the nineteenth century. In those early years the perceived
melodies were transcribed by the use of musical notation, producing a visual repre-
sentation of voices in the absence of singers. In the case of the spiritual, the techno-
logical appropriation of absent black bodies by white audiences is directly connected
to the marginalisation of African Americans in American culture and society.14 This as-
pect has heavily influenced the history of globalised popular music and will therefore
occur again later in this article.
With the emergence of sound-recording technologies at the end of the nineteenth
century, it became possible to listen to “disembodied voice[s]”,15 the voices of ab-
sent singers. Two different sound technologies, both developed in the United States,
competed for the first place in a now-globalised industrial world: Thomas Alva Edi-
son’s phonograph and Emile Berliner’s gramophone.16 Contemporary commentators
on the phonograph expressed their fascination with listening to the voices of absent
people. For instance, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, a member of the elite public
for Edison’s product presentations in Germany in 1889, commentated vividly on the
14 Cf. Weheliye 2002, 28.
15 Laing 1991, 7.
16 Cf. Gauß 2009; Osborne 2014.
JRFM
Journal Religion Film Media, Band 02/01
- Titel
- JRFM
- Untertitel
- Journal Religion Film Media
- Band
- 02/01
- Autoren
- Christian Wessely
- Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati
- Herausgeber
- Uni-Graz
- Verlag
- Schüren Verlag GmbH
- Ort
- Graz
- Datum
- 2016
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC 4.0
- Abmessungen
- 14.8 x 21.0 cm
- Seiten
- 132
- Kategorien
- Zeitschriften JRFM