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

[...]voice studies struggles with cross-pollinating these two camps. Voice pedagogy and instructors presume voice can be quantified and "known" (49). [...]both formal and informal voice lessons become the terrain for making racial and gendered meaning through voice. While The Race of Sound offers indispensable ways for inverting the acousmatic question and denaturalizing voice (i.e., "listening-to-listening" critical practice methodology), the work may leave readers with a series of questions. [...]Eidsheim's remarks on Angela Davis's and Farah Jasmine Griffin's works on Billie Holiday as voice scholarship vested in the cult of fidelity seems misplaced.