Encountering the singing body

Workshops to explore the embodied experiences of creative, relational voicing took place for classically trained singers, and their reflections are discussed and interpreted. Such reflections offer critical insight into a previously developed practice, through which we seek to facilitate performers’ encounters of their own and others’ voices and bodies as unified. This approach is founded on our previously published argument that classical voice training and practice have historically used the voicing body as a tool obedient to a “higher-order” mind. In these workshops, the aim is not only to redress this mind–body–voice segregation, but also to interrogate participants’ impressions and experiences of this effort using a series of questionnaires. Findings suggest that such a reflective experience offers potential benefits to singers’ wellbeing by encouraging them to perceive their own and others’ sounding bodies as something to be understood and explored creatively rather than disciplined and subdued.

Them and the Timbre of Gender

Inspired by a question—“Trans singers exist, but what would we do with them?”—Marchand Knight, a classically trained soprano, began composing Them, an opera based on the lives of genderqueer artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. These questions emerged as central to the piece: Does gender have a timbre? What are the semiotics of gender that are implicitly (or explicitly) embedded in operatic composition by librettists and composers, and how can they be used or dismantled in this work? How has the taming of the classical voice by the German Fach system stymied Western awareness of what falls outside the box? Through a combination of secondary and primary source research on opera culture, voice science and training methodologies, aesthetics, timbre perception, and gender semiotics, Marchand Knight and Marchand challenge the notion of gendered voices by looking at sounds praised outside of white, Eurocentric, patriarchal, classical vocal pedagogies.

Documentary Mappings

This chapter focuses on the 1920s and 1930s as a constitutive phase of the documentary film, as well as on the genre’s initial relation to cities (and, by extension, their slums). It introduces the notion of ‘cognitive mapping’ and asks why it was especially the city that became documentary film’s first major subject. The chapter first discusses well-known ‘city symphonies’ of the 1920s, but focuses then on a lesser-known example, La Zone (Lacombe 1928), which maps the Parisian slum belt (la zone) as a ‘rag-pickers’ country’. The chapter goes on to show how some of the ideas of the ‘social avant-garde’ flow into John Grierson’s notion of ‘social documentary film’ and its power to disclose a society’s ‘true heroes’, its ordinary people and workers. The chapter provides a close reading of a paradigmatic Griersonian documentary, Housing Problems (Anstey and Elton 1935). The film employs a classical voice-of-authority style and exemplifies some of Grierson’s progressive ideas (giving ordinary people a voice). In conclusion, the chapter shows how the strategies of Housing Problems have become conventions of TV documentaries today, particularly the problematic (sociological and apparently scientific) mapping of urban poverty from both the ideological and visual ‘perspective-of-god’.

Gesture and body-movement as teaching and learning tools in the classical voice lesson: a survey into current practice

This article discusses the use of gesture and body-movement in the teaching of singing and reports on a survey amongst professional singing teachers in Germany regarding their use of gesture and body movement as pedagogic tools in their teaching. The nomenclature of gestures and movements used in the survey is based on a previous study by the author (Nafisi, 2008, 2010) categorising movements in the teaching of singing according to their pedagogical intent intoPhysiological Gestures, Sensation-related Gestures, Musical GesturesandBody-Movements. The survey demonstrated thatGestureswere used by a significant number of voice teachers to enhance explanation and/or demonstration, that a significant number of voice teachers encouraged their students to carry out similar Gestures whilst singing to enhance their learning experience and that another type of essentially non-expressiveBody-Movementswas also encouraged by a significant number of voice teachers to enhance students’ learning. The paper validates the author's nomenclature and offers some hitherto unpublished insights.

Closed User Group Automotive Communication Network Based on Addressing at Physical Layer

Intelligent Vehicle communication is the keyword for the emerging vehicular technologies such as group cooperative driving, real time Engine Operating parameters (EOP) monitoring, collision warning, geo location based mobility applications, and classical voice and data conveyance. The technologies require extensive interaction between the peers which mostly use the framework of the state of the art cellular or radio trunking networks. This may vitiate the network performance due to the surge in mobility management messages originated by the devices plugged in the vehicles. The performance may be severely impacted due to the unique characteristics of vehicular networks e.g., high mobility. Due to the high proliferation of these Machine to Machine (M2M) and Machine to Application (M2A) devices in near future, the cell sizes will shrink, resulting in more signalling messages in the network. Considering classical voice communication services for typical car fleet implementations, the radio trunking networks have capacity constrains due to inability of frequency reuse and absence of mobility management techniques. The alternative is to seek out an access technology considering the fact that a more intelligent physical layer can be employed directly for addressing and mobility management. In this paper the authors address a Closed User Group network implementation for Vehicle to Vehicle/central office communication which can actuate voice and data communication without incorporating any application layer.