The
21st-century Voice. Contemporary
and Traditional Extra-Normal Voice
by Michael Edward
Edgerton
Scarecrow Press,
Lanham, MD, 2005
224 pp., illus. b/w, with audio cd. Paper,
$42.95
ISBN: 0-8108-5354-X.
Reviewed
by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool
Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@hogent.be
Anyone with even the slightest interest
in traditional and world music, avant-garde,
pop and classical will surely has noticed
the sheer endless variety of vocal techniques
that are available to today’s performers.
Shouting, humming, multiphonics, inhaling,
whispering and whistling are just a few
of the tools in their toolbox. All this
certainly makes for fascinating music,
but it leaves composers, ethnographers
and musicologists with the daunting problem
of categorizing and noting what is in
the air and performers with nothing less
than a moral duty to expand their repertoire
if they want to stay in trade.
Composer and performer Michael Edward
Edgerton has undertaken this Herculean
task with enthusiasm, insight, and a lot
of common sense. Building on such diverse
sciences as phonetics, physics, organology,
and linguistics, he describes and analyzes
any vocal and paravocal sound imaginable——and
some of them unimaginable if you rely
only on your inner ear and your past experience.
Even better, he has collected hundreds
of fragments from scores and 99 audio
samples to illustrate the many techniques
and practices he describes. Do not expect
to hear some Klingon or an outlandish
dialect spoken on Tatooine though. The
collection is limited to what the human
vocal tract can reasonably produce, and
that is an awful lot on its own account.
Sensibly, the author hasn’t tried
to categorize sounds by what you hear
but by how they are produced. And, again
sensibly, this means he has to start with
the basic element of sound: airflow. From
this he moves on to the source of vocal
sounds: the human voice itself, how it
is built, what its characteristics and
limitations are and how its potential
may be tapped. Next comes articulation
and resonance or the formation of intelligible
and unintelligible sounds during speech
and song. " . . . [A]s this text
is about potentials for sound production,
it was clear that a model needed to be
developed that would account for all
regions and manners available for human
sound production that practically should
retain the qualities of flexibility
and ease of absorption and retention.
The result was the development of a mapping
of vocal tract articulation for filter-like,
turbulent and absolute airflow modification"
(p. xxiii, emphasis by the author).
Multiphonics in all its disguises has
a chapter of its own, leading to some
reflections on where it all might end
(‘extermes’) and what to do
if things go wrong (‘causes and treatments
of vocal disorders’).
Of course, the voice in itself can be
amplified, modified, and augmented by
means of classical and modern (electronic)
instruments. This is what Edgerton calls
‘interfaces’, and it naturally
and logically leads to the question of
how people listen or rather how sound
is perceived in different contexts.
This is, by far, the most comprehensive
text ever published on vocal techniques.
Its many illustrations——both
graphical and auditory——and
its clear and concise writing makes it
an invaluable sourcebook for composers
and performers as well as a fun read for
those who just want to enlarge the repertoire
of their solitary shower performance.
Mind your arytenoid cartilage!
