Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media - Softcover

Smith, Jacob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520254945 ISBN 13: 9780520254947

Publisher: University of California Press, 2008

Synopsis

This entertaining and innovative book focuses on vocal performance styles that developed in tandem with the sound technologies of the phonograph, radio, and sound film. Writing in a clear and lively style, Jacob Smith looks at these media technologies and industries through the lens of performance, bringing to light a fascinating nexus of performer, technology, and audience. Combining theories of film sound, cultural histories of sound technologies and industries, and theories of performance, Smith convincingly connects disparate and largely neglected performance niches to explore the development of a modern vocal performance. Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media demonstrates the voice to be a vehicle of performance, identity, and culture and illustrates both the interconnection of all these categories and their relation to the media technologies of the past century.

About this title

About the Author

Jacob Smith is Lecturer in the Institute of Film and Television Studies in the Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham.

From the Back Cover

"Vocal Tracks offers just the sort of multimedia approach that we desperately need. Smith leaves no sound untuned: the phonograph, cinema, microphones, radio, television, and even prank phone calls. A great read for anyone interested in the cultural history of sound."--Rick Altman, author of Silent Film Sound

From the Inside Flap

Vocal Tracks offers just the sort of multimedia approach that we desperately need. Smith leaves no sound untuned: the phonograph, cinema, microphones, radio, television, and even prank phone calls. A great read for anyone interested in the cultural history of sound. Rick Altman, author of Silent Film Sound

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Vocal Tracks

Performance and Sound MediaBy Jacob Smith

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2008 The Regents of the University of California
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-25494-7

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................................viiIntroduction.................................................................1PART ONE: Flooding Out1. Recorded Laughter and the Performance of Authenticity.....................152. Erotic Performance on Record..............................................50PART TWO: A Finer Grain of the Voice3. The Nearness of You; or, The Voice of Melodrama...........................814. Rough Mix.................................................................115PART THREE: Bugging the Backstage5. The Act of Being Yourself.................................................1656. Phony Performances........................................................200Conclusion...................................................................243Notes........................................................................251Bibliography.................................................................271Index........................................................................287

Chapter One

Recorded Laughter and the Performance of Authenticity

In Steven Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), the android David (Haley Joel Osment) tries desperately to appear human and so win the love of his adoptive mother, Monica (Frances O'Connor). In one of the film's most affecting scenes, David and his "parents" laugh at the way Monica eats her spaghetti. At first, David's laughter appears remarkably human, making us momentarily forget that he is a robot (figure 1). But gradually this laughter takes on an eerie and uncanny quality that makes him seem less human than ever. Jonathan Rosenbaum writes that the scene asks us to consider the line between mechanical and real laughter: "The laughter of David and his adopted parents becomes impossible to define as either forced or genuine, mechanical or spontaneous, leaving us perpetually suspended over the question as if over an abyss" (2001, 36). There is nothing new about this phenomenon. Though the spasmodic and nonsemantic nature of laughter makes it seem an unlikely carrier of meaning, it has played an ongoing role in the presentation of the authentically human in mass-mediated texts, notably on early genres of phonographic recordings and the broadcast laugh track.

The sound of uninhibited laughter, produced both by performers and by audiences, was an important index of authentic presence used to bridge the gap between recorded sound and the listener. The recording studios of the phonograph industry represented a radically new type of performance space, where performers had to develop new stylistic techniques meant, in Jonathan Sterne's words, to "stand in for reality within the system of reproduced sounds" (2003, 285). The laugh emerged as an expression that was particularly able to represent a sense of immediacy when mechanically reproduced for audiences that studio performers would never see. Recorded genres of "laughing songs," "laughing records," and "laughing stories" show that the laugh played a central role in the introduction of recorded sound as a form of entertainment. Further, these records can be seen as precursors to broadcast laugh tracks, which I place in the historical and discursive contexts of radio, television, and an "ideology of liveness."

Paddy Scannell writes that "all day, every day and everywhere people listen to radio and watch television as part of the utterly familiar, normal things that anyone does on any normal day" (1996, 6). The laugh track is an especially mundane part of the everyday TV experience that Scannell describes. For most viewers the sound of the laugh track is intensely, intimately familiar, so much so that focusing on it takes a concerted effort. It is by definition background, a part of the sonic wallpaper, effortlessly tuned out. In this chapter I'd like to bring the background to the fore, to make that familiar sonic object strange. As I plan to show, the laugh track is part of a larger story of the recorded laugh in the history of media, and telling that story can provide insights into the ways in which people have interacted with media technologies and in which bodies and voices have been represented through them. As such, the examples I will present from phonograph records and radio broadcasts can also illuminate performances found in Hollywood films. Throughout these different media contexts, the laugh has been presented as the ultimate expression of the human-often as the result of its connection to discourses about race, class, and gender-and its mechanical reproduction has served as a lightning rod for anxieties concerning the social dimensions of mass media performance and consumption.

CRACKING UP: THE PERFORMANCE OF LAUGHTER

To begin an examination of the relationship between performed laughter and the media, consider the way in which early "talking machines" were demonstrated to the public. Interestingly, the use of the laugh to demonstrate the virtuosity of talking machines predates Thomas Edison's 1877 invention of the phonograph; it can be found in conjunction with the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century devices of Wolfgang von Kempelen and Joseph Faber. Kempelen, most famous for his automaton chess player, also designed a keyboard-operated machine in the 1780s that could imitate the vocal organs. Using Kempelen's designs, Charles Wheatstone, a leading British scientist of the time, built a talking machine in 1837. After seeing it demonstrated, an observer wrote that the machine "laughs and cryes with a perfect imitation of nature" (Feaster 2006b, 52). A decade later Joseph Faber designed a similar speaking machine that featured the torso of a "Turk" and a more convenient keyboard. The Illustrated London News noted in 1846 that the machine was capable of not only speech, but "even whispering, laughing and singing: all this depending on the agility of the director in manipulating the keys" (Feaster 2001, 67). Indeed, laughter seems to have become a routine part of Faber's demonstrations after 1846; the London Times noted on August 12 of that year that the machine laughed "with the merriment of good humour" (cited in Feaster 2006b, 68). The laugh seems to have been a particularly evocative performance, one that was used for testing both the realism and the amusement value of a talking machine.

This was still the case when Edison's tinfoil phonograph was displayed thirty years later. Early demonstrations of the phonograph often delighted audiences: the machine laughed and coughed and sneezed. Accounts of exhibitions of the tinfoil phonograph reveal that laughter recurred frequently. Take, for example, an article from the New York Sun on February 22, 1878, which described how Edison "coughed, sneezed, and laughed at the mouthpiece, and the matrixes returned the noises true as a die." The Philadelphia Press on March 9, 1878, described the following demonstration: "Laughter and whistling and singing and sighing and groans-in fact, every utterance of which the human voice is capable-was stored in that wondrous wheel and emitted when it was turned." The New York Daily Graphic described on March 15, 1878, how a phonograph exhibitor had "laughed to his heart's content ... and the sounds were reproduced" (Feaster 2006a, 125).

In these demonstrations of the phonograph, as was true of earlier demonstrations of talking automata, the laugh was presented as the spontaneous creaturely expression of embodiment, a performance particularly capable of testing the limits of mechanical reproduction. The laugh in this context functioned like the "easily recognizable forms of human speech," such as rhymes or popular quotations, that Jonathan Sterne (2003, 251) argues were mobilized to "help the machine": "by the use of clichd and conventionalized language, early 'performers' of sound reproduction helped listeners help the machine reproduce speech." But the laugh continued to play a central role in phonographic performance beyond these initial demonstrations, as is indicated by the fact that it was prominently featured in the recording industry's earliest catalogs.

George Washington Johnson's Laughing Song-whose chorus is a gale of rhythmic laugher-stands as a particularly dramatic case in point because its massive popularity made it an instant standard that was "closely identified with the emerging entertainment phonograph" (T. Brooks 2005, 32). Johnson's laughter was transmitted far and wide by traveling exhibitors like Lyman Howe, whose 1891 program at the Welsh Congregational Church in Scranton included Johnson's Laughing Song fifth on the bill (Musser 1991, 32). Tim Brooks, a historian of recorded sound, cites the report of a traveling exhibitor in New England to the trade journal the Phonogram in July 1892: "Johnson's 'Whistling Coon' and laughing song are immensely popular, and I presume they will always be. There is more call for them than for any other selections" (T. Brooks 2005, 34).

Johnson's records were an important part of traveling phonograph demonstrations, and The Laughing Song became perhaps the first blockbuster of the emerging market for entertainment phonograph records. Johnson had been performing for coins at the Hudson River ferryboat terminal when he was hired by Victor H. Emerson to record for the New Jersey Phonograph Company in 1890 (T. Brooks 2005, 26). The U.S. Phonograph Company's 1894 catalog claimed that "over 25,000" copies of The Laughing Song had been sold; as for sheet music of the song (which Johnson wrote himself), the figure was said to be "over 50,000" (T. Brooks 2005, 35, 40). Whatever the exact numbers, this record was certainly one of the (if not the) best-selling records in the country during the 1890s (T. Brooks 2004, 55).

Johnson's performances of "The Laughing Song" and "The Whistling Coon" are also notable as the first popular vocal recordings made by an African American. Johnson's laugh certainly carried with it racist stereotypes of the minstrel show, as was illustrated by the comments of the early phonograph producer Fred Gaisberg, who described Johnson's laugh as "deep-bellied [and] lazy like a carefree darky" (1942, 40). In an American musical culture steeped in the blackface minstrel show tradition, part of Johnson's success had to do with his aura of authenticity: "Johnson's performance sounded authentic, just like the black panhandler on the street. This was far more unusual than it might seem, for in the early days of recording most artists sang in distinct, stilted, almost shouted tones, striving above all else to make the words very clear and understandable. When they imitated blacks, in sketches and song, they were so broad and mannered as to be almost cartoonish. But here was the real thing, a black street singer doing just what he did for nickels on the sidewalks of New York" (T. Brooks 2005, 31-32). In spite of their racist stereotypes, these records are important documents of African American recorded vocal expression, and ones that highlight both the limited stylistic choices available to blacks and their inventive and resourceful responses to those limitations. In the context of my larger argument, Johnson's "authentic" blackness was performed by his laughter and served to amplify the sense of authenticity already associated with that expression.

As was the case with pre-phonographic talking machines, the laugh was a significant and powerful index of presence for the first audiences of prerecorded performances. Johnson's Laughing Song juxtaposes sung verses with a chorus of rhythmic laughter, but another early phonographic genre called laughing records are almost entirely the sound of unrestrained and unaccompanied laughter. These records were made by various labels throughout the first decades of the century and can tell us more about the interaction of vocal performance and media technologies.

One of the most successful was The Okeh Laughing Record, released in 1922. This recording did so well that it was quickly followed by two sequels called The Second Laughing Record and The Okeh Laughing Dance Record (T. Brooks 1979, 3). In the most prevalent model of the laughing record genre, a recurring, elementary narrative frames the laughter. The records begin with a very solemn performance of a musical solo (often a horn or a vocal performance). These recordings are "framed" in a very particular way: a serious musical piece is being performed, and so the listener is keyed to respond appropriately. By "frame," I refer to Erving Goffman's term for the definition of a situation that governs social events (1974, 10). The initial framing of laughing records as highbrow concert culture must be seen in light of the high prestige that classical music had for phonograph listeners in the early decades of the century. The phonograph industry made clear distinctions between its high- and low-culture products, distinctions that were physically inscribed on records: from 1903 Victor's operatic recordings bore a "Red Seal," in contrast to the "Black Seal" of popular records. Although high-culture products were prominently featured in industry ads and catalogs, it was sales of the low-culture popular tunes that had enabled the expansion of the phonograph companies: "Victor produced three times as many popular as operatic discs" (William Howland Kenney 1999, xiii).

The introductory music on these laughing records establishes a classical performance with a one-to-one relationship between the musical performer and a listener. This performance is then punctuated by a fluff of some kind, an audible (sometimes barely audible) mistake that interrupts the smooth flow of the musical solo. Immediately following the mistake, a woman is heard to break out laughing. Her presence was previously hidden, and her laughter thus changes the listener's framing relationship to the recorded performance.

For Goffman, laughing can be an important instance of flooding out, when "the individual will capsize" as a social interactant, dissolving into "laughter or tears or anger" (1974, 350). The most common instance of flooding out is the "unsuccessful effort to suppress laughter, sometimes called 'breaking (or cracking) up'" (351). This phrase is particularly appropriate, as it points to the cracking up of the social frame as well as to the act of uncontrolled laughter itself. When the woman in the laughing record floods out, the one-to-one situation between listener and performer is altered, as there are now at least two audience members. The listener's role is suddenly made uncertain, free-floating. Is the listener part of an audience-or situated outside and overhearing the performance? The woman's flooding out precipitates the listener's frame reorganization: the listener has lost a certain formal connection with the performer but has gained a relationship to the laughing audience member, who has broached the ritual constraints of the situation.

As the recording develops, the musician nobly tries to continue the instrumental solo, but the laughter of the woman in the audience proves so unsettling and infectious that the performer cracks up as well, revealing his identity as a man. What follows for the rest of the record are waves of laughter from both the man and woman, each one's guffaws stimulating and encouraging the other's, interspersed by short-lived attempts by the man to return to his performance. After the performer's first mistake and the introduction of the laughing woman, the listener's role has been problematized. Now, as the performer himself floods out with laughter, his role is also destabilized, and the listener's further so. The distinction between performer and audience member on the recording breaks down, and as the contagious laughter stimulates the listener, the distinction between listener and recorded performer breaks down as well. All three subjects become unified in this community of spontaneous laughter: a moment of frame disintegration.

The main purpose of these recordings seems to have been the incitation of the listener's laughter, a project in which they were successful far beyond the scope of their local cultural origins. Fred Gaisberg wrote that Burt Sheppard's Laughing Record was "world famous," and had sold "over half a million in India alone." He provides this brief description of its reception: "In the bazaars of India I have seen dozens of natives seated on their haunches round a gramophone, rocking with laughter, whilst playing Sheppard's laughing record" (1942, 41). Similarly, Andrew F. Jones, in his study of media culture in the Chinese Jazz Age, describes this scene:

Sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, a young Frenchman named Labansat set up an outdoor stall on Tibet Road in Shanghai and began to play gramophone records for curious Chinese passersby. Labansat, whose career up to that point had consisted in operating a peep show for Shanghai theatergoers, had recently purchased an imported gramophone from a foreign firm, Moutrie & Company. His new business gambit was simple and effective; he would ask each listener to pay ten cents to hear a novelty record called "Laughing Foreigners" (Yangren daxiao). Anyone able to resist laughing along with the chuckles, chortles, and guffaws emerging from the horn of the gramophone would get his or her money back. (2001, 53)

Jones notes that Labansat "laughed all the way to the bank," earning enough from this routine to establish China's first record company (53).

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520254945
• ISBN 13: 9780520254947
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304