Doctoral Dissertation Research: Re-articulating The Voice - Vocal Correction Technology in Design and Practice

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary This doctoral dissertation improvement grant supports historical and social research on the design and use of vocal tuning and correcting technologies. Over the last two decades, the practice of digitally correcting timing and intonation in live or recorded voices has become commonplace. Widespread instances of creative misuse have led to challenges of the standards used in determining what counts as a well-tuned voice. This research will trace the emergence and diffusion of novel modifications of the voice across a number of fields including signal processing, electro-acoustics, speech pathology, recording engineering, and computer music research. It will identify and analyze the social stakes underlying the development of vocal correction standards in studio technology. The social and historical study is both timely and important in light of recent disruptions in the political economy of music production. Those disruptions include the collapse of the major label business model in the context of online file-sharing, the democratization of recording technology and resulting contraction of studio recording infrastructure, the recasting of the expertise of recording engineers, and the radically changing sound of popular music in response to new modes of intervention. It will provide important insights concerning these developments and their effects on the bodies and livelihoods of performers, engineers, and listeners. Technical Summary The researcher will conduct semi-structured oral historical interviews with key innovators and practitioners in fields associated with corrective vocal processing, as well as analyses of archival material on the development of antecedent technologies such as analog pitch-time compression, pitch estimation, and cybernetic models of the speech-hearing system. These findings will be incorporated with existing ethnographic data concerning the innovative and improvisational use of vocal correction technologies in order to produce a deeper account of their initial and ongoing development. Interview subjects will be selected via chain-referral sampling, with the aim of tracing the movement of knowledge and techniques between and within communities of practice. This research will improve understanding of an increasingly wide-spread yet critically unexamined area of technological practice by showing the social and practical contexts that have shaped understandings about what the key aspects of the voice are, how they are to be evaluated, and how best to correct them. It will also contribute to conversations in constructionist sociology of technology and embodied perception by investigating the construction of a key infrastructure for representing and intervening in the speech-hearing system.