Review: The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music by Nina Sun Eidsheim (original) (raw)

2019, Journal of Popular Music Studies

Nina Sun Eidsheim's The Race of Sound compels us to pause in order to listen to how we listen. Aiming to raise "awareness of timbral discrimination," The Race of Sound asserts that we have been entrained and socialized to hear difference based on essentialist notions of racial identity expression. Eidsheim writes, "We are conditioned to hear what we listen for and to assume that what we hear is indisputable, and this conditioning acts like planted evidence" (). The Race of Sound opens with a convincing critique of the question often posed when one listens to a human voice: Who is this? This question, what Eidsheim terms the acousmatic question (after Pierre Schaeffer's acousmatic and Mendi Obadike's black acousmatic), fails to recognize, according to Eidsheim, that "it is not possible to know voice, vocal identity, and meaning as such; we can know them only in their multidimensional, always unfolding processes and practices, indeed in their multiplicities" (). In order to work towards a necessary fuller understanding of how race is constructed problematically through vocal timbre, Eidsheim insists that we "turn our inquiry to the listener who materializes his or her own values when naming voice" () in order to examine "how ideas and ways of listening manifest" (). That is, we must practice listening to listening. The Race of Sound builds on Eidsheim's first book, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice. Sensing Sound emphasizes that all sound is vibrationand that the material production, transmission, and reception of voices, including in and through our own bodies, exceed the limited roles we tend to assign to audible sound. While Sensing Sound demonstrates how naturalizing certain elements of sound impacts experiences of voice, The Race of Sound reveals the political and ethical aspects of such practices as they produce racial differenceparticularly blackness. The assumption that race and gender are cultural constructions, not essential, fixed identities based in biological difference, is an accepted understanding. Eidsheim argues, however, that because of "unexamined listening practices," many listeners still perceive vocal timbre as an essential, easily detectable quality that correlates with the vocalizer's apparent race, gender, or sexuality. The reasons for this mistaken listening are not based in a lack of training. Instead, in her focus on classical vocal training and the assumptions informing vocal coaching pedagogies in