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

这个博士论文改进补助金支持对声乐调音和纠正技术的设计和使用的历史和社会研究。在过去的二十年里，在现场或录制的声音中进行数字校正时间和语调的做法已经变得司空见惯。广泛存在的创造性滥用的情况导致了对用于确定什么是良好声音的标准的挑战。这项研究将追踪语音的新修改的出现和扩散，包括信号处理，电声，语音病理学，录音工程和计算机音乐研究。它将识别和分析录音室技术中声乐矫正标准发展的社会风险。社会和历史的研究是及时和重要的，鉴于最近在音乐生产的政治经济中断。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基础设施的收缩、录音工程师专业知识的重塑以及流行音乐的声音因新的干预模式而发生的根本变化。它将提供有关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与矫正声乐处理相关领域的主要创新者和从业者进行半结构化的口头历史访谈，以及分析有关先行技术发展的档案材料，如模拟音高时间压缩，音高估计，和语音听觉系统的控制论模型。这些研究结果将与现有的民族志数据有关的创新和即兴使用的声乐矫正技术，以产生更深入的帐户，他们的初始和持续的发展。访谈对象将通过连锁推荐抽样方式选定，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社会和实践背景来提高对日益广泛但未经严格审查的技术实践领域的理解，这些背景塑造了对声音的关键方面的理解，如何评估它们，以及如何最好地纠正它们。它还将有助于对话的技术和体现感知的建构主义社会学调查的一个关键基础设施的建设，代表和干预的语音听觉系统。

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.