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

这一博士论文改进基金支持历史和社会研究声乐调谐和校正技术的设计和使用。在过去的二十年里，在现场或录制的语音中以数字方式校正时间和语调的做法已经变得司空见惯。创造性滥用的广泛存在，导致了人们对判断什么是好的声音的标准提出了挑战。这项研究将追踪声音的新修改的出现和传播，涉及多个领域，包括信号处理、电声学、语音病理学、录音工程和计算机音乐研究。它将确定和分析演播室技术中声音矫正标准发展的潜在社会利害关系。鉴于最近音乐生产的政治经济中断，这项社会和历史研究既及时又重要。这些破坏包括在线文件共享背景下主要唱片公司商业模式的崩溃，录音技术的民主化和由此导致的录音室录音基础设施的收缩，录音工程师的专业知识重塑，以及流行音乐的声音因新的干预模式而发生根本性变化。它将提供关于这些发展及其对表演者、工程师和听众的身体和生计的影响的重要见解。技术总结研究人员将对与矫正声音处理相关领域的关键创新者和实践者进行半结构化的口头历史访谈，并分析关于先前技术发展的档案材料，如模拟音调时间压缩、音调估计和语音-听力系统的控制论模型。这些调查结果将与现有的关于创新和即兴使用发声矫正技术的人种学数据结合在一起，以便更深入地说明这些技术最初和正在进行的发展。访谈主题将通过连锁转介抽样来选择，目的是追踪知识和技术在实践社区之间和内部的流动情况。这项研究将通过展示形成对声音的关键方面是什么的理解的社会和实践背景，如何评估它们，以及如何最好地纠正它们，来提高对这个日益广泛但尚未经过严格审查的技术实践领域的理解。它还将通过调查代表和干预言语-听力系统的关键基础设施的建设，促进建构主义技术社会学和体现知觉的对话。

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.