The musicality of the voice in contemporary television

Mera, Miguel (2024) The musicality of the voice in contemporary television. In, Halfyard, Janet K. and Reyland, Nicholas (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Music and Sound in Peak TV. 1 ed. Palgrave Macmillan Cham, pp. 201-219. (doi:10.1007/978-3-031-62990-7_10).

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

This chapter proposes a framework for exploring the musicality of the voice in contemporary television. By rising to a challenge set by Claudia Gorbman and further developing Danijela Kulezic-Wilson’s investigation of the musicalisation of speech, a variety of computational tools will be used to analyse musical features such as timbre, pitch, rhythm, repetition, phrasing, and punctuation. Analysis of vocal exemplars will build towards a Repetition, Interruption, Punctuation (RIP) schematic as a means of understanding the musical flow of dialogue. This shows how the overarching organisational structure can generate pleasure that is similar to listening to a highly skilled musical ensemble and how the musicality of speech generates an affective core in contemporary television. The joyous complexity of Peak TV encourages a renewed appreciation of the musicality of the voice which functions as a form of affective operational aesthetics.

Text

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