The Voice as a Cultural Phenomenon

20 hrs. 31 min.

Miscellaneous

Language Russian

Author Oksana Bulgakova

Narrator Nadezhda Vinokurova

Description

Oxana Bulgakova’s book “Voice as a Cultural Phenomenon” analyzes the perception and cultural existence of voices from the mid-19th century to the end of the 20th century. Examining various aspects of voice practices (in opera and dramatic theater, on the political stage, in cinema, and so on), as well as historical features of perception, the author investigates the dynamics of relationships between natural and artificial (mechanical, electric, electronic) voices across cultures of different countries. She pays special attention to the distinctive nature of Russian understanding of voice. Oxana Bulgakova is a film scholar, researcher of visual culture, and professor at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. She is the author of books published by “Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie” (“Gesture Factory” (2005), “Soviet Sound-Seeing Eye—Film and Its Senses” (2010)).

Contents:

Preface
First introduction. The elusive object, mythical figures, and literary motifs
Living/dead
Internal/external
Human/divine, individual/normative
Organic/mechanical, authentic/illusory
Natural/cultural
Second introduction. Signs of differentiation. Study models. Problems of description
Medicine, physiology, and art
Electroacoustics and psychology. Individual and universal
The collective as universal. Psychoanalyst Paul Moses read by Adorno
Sound metaphors
Adjectives of Russian prose
First chapter. Voice as imagination and image
Literary fantasies, metaphorical plots
Opera: passion, death, and singing machines. Western European romantics and decadents
“Without Italian ornaments and in primeval simplicity.” Italian opera and Russian opera criticism
Nature without art. Russian voice and Russian literary hearing
Twilight of idols: 1908
Russian bass and Russian tenor—with foreign ears
Theatrical coloraturas
Canon. Purity of voice and music of affects
Moscow dialect and theatrical roles
Voice settings and add-ons
MKhT: murmuring, dialects, rasping, shouting
Searching for silence. The voice of a puppet
The first acoustic Russian novel
Ino-singing and melodекламация
Prophets: politicians and poets
New professional voices in public life theater
Phonograph. Dead and living
Whose voice is the most famous
“The Voice of Blok”
Dancing poets
Cinema plots. Dead and living once again
Phonograph and cinema: mechanical and living, funny and horrible
An unsuccessful comedy, an unnoticed tragedy
Theft of the voice
Second chapter. Electrical voices of the 1930s
Cinema echoes
Russian utopias of universal intelligibility. Voice without words
Historical memory
Reduction—an outcry
Search for the canon
Voice in space or at a microphone
Artificial voices. How robots and pikes sing
The ideal voice, national stereotype: Hollywood and Germany
Male and female, erotic and electric
The inner voice as someone else’s
Chimeras: naturalness, subjectivity, individuality
Accents and multilingualism
Echo of the voice. Nature and technology, technology as nature
Music as a medium
Spoken voice as musical—an ideal or a technical necessity?
Words without a voice
A song for every day
Singing instead of dialogue
Volume and tempo. Stage voice. Intimate and public
Soviet film voice
The ears of a linguist and a cultural scholar
Radio voice
Radio waves and radio everyday life
Authenticity and performativity
The ideal announcer. A voice of impersonal individuality
A voice from the loudspeaker. Loud cries
The voice of Soviet history
Orators and dictators
Nature and technology. Hitler
“Intuit” and “somnambulist”: Kerensky and Trotsky
“Where to put Shalyapin!” Lenin and his medial embodiment
Nature “without technology.” Stalin and his medial doubles
Third chapter. Breaking of the voice
“Sound” of the 1950s
Cinema voices: Marlon Brando and Innokenty Smoktunovsky
Style and the ideology of style
A new norm for the electric voice. The victory of intimacy
The body of the voice and manners
Loud women, quiet men
Technology as nature. Consequences of abberation
Restoration. The disrupted archive of Soviet vocal memory
Conclusion
Technique-nature: voice in digital processing mode
Theater and Performance. Man-machine, man-machine
The self as the other, the other as the self