The author would like to thank Adriana da Silva for providing Spanish-language transcription and translation assistance. When Lin-Manuel Miranda hosted Saturday Night Live on October 8, 2016, his opening monologue quickly morphed into an equally personal and political reimagining of “My Shot,” the first solo for founding father Alexander Hamilton, the tenacious titular… Read More
Reflections on the Errant Voices Conference, April 2022 Consider the adjective “errant.” The word might describe a misbehaving child careening through the galleries of the Uffizi in Florence, Italy, or a knight cresting the peak of a mountain in search of his dragon. An errant traveler might be pursuing a… Read More
What makes a voice sound beautiful, or meaningful, or authoritative? And what is at stake for singers when the vocal sounds associated with authority originated from a history of harm? On her most recent album, She Walks in Beauty (2021), singer Marianne Faithfull probes these questions by musically re-imagining the… Read More
Acoustic hailing devices (AHDs) are high-intensity directional sound systems that produce narrow sound beams with very loud, high sound pressure levels that can be aimed at particular locations: that is, directed to target specific auditors. They are optimized to project intelligible voice messages as well as impactful, attention-commanding warning and… Read More
When the German software company Celemony premiered the first market-ready version of Melodyne at the North American Music Merchants (NAMM) conference in Anaheim, California, in 2000, music software buyers and enthusiasts responded to the product tepidly, and with a bit of confusion. Melodyne’s engineering team had envisioned and designed the… Read More