Jacob Smith,
Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008
ISBN: 9 780520254 94 7
US$24.95 (pb)
304pp
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press
http://www.ucpress.edu/)

Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media begins with a description of a phonograph record from 1908 called The Laughing Spectator in which a talented comedian plays multiple speaking parts in a performance that is ‘interrupted’ by the hysterical, uncontrollable laughter of a supposed member of the audience. The comedy routine plays with, and acknowledges, the distance between listener and performer newly imposed by the invention of the phonograph. Jacob Smith uses it, in part, as an example of how quickly vocal performance styles shifted to maximise the potential of a new technology. It also sets the tone for the remainder of his peculiar and interesting book, not only its thematic concerns (the intersection of listeners, vocal performances and sound media technologies) but also its approach (focusing on a diverse selection of obscure, esoteric and often very interesting case studies). Working as a base note to the study of vocal performance and sound media is a discussion of the discourses vocal authenticity and its relationship to the body, and also to race, gender and class.

The first two chapters of Vocal Tracks draw on the work of sociologist Erving Goffman and in particular his term ‘flooding out’ which describes a kind of spasmodic bubbling over of uncontainable emotional expression. Smith begins by considering the recorded laugh as one example of a highly mediated ‘flooding out’. He looks first to turn-of-the-last-century phonographic ‘laughing records’ and ‘laughing story records’ the main purpose of which “seems to have been the incitation of the listener’s laughter” (p. 21). In these recordings, says Smith, we can see how laughter is used to bridge the divide newly created between performer and listener by phonograph records. The remainder of the chapter considers the history of the laugh track and describes a similar fixation with reuniting performers and listeners through the acoustic simulation of a live theatre performance and its (laughing) audience. For Smith, however, the debates concerning the use of both canned laughter and the laughter of a ‘live studio audience’ demonstrate an ongoing anxiety about the authenticity of such a mediated form of ‘flooding out’.  Chapter two discusses ‘blue discs’ as another example of ‘flooding out’. Blue discs were early phonograph discs that Smith describes as “roughly the phonographic equivalent of the stag film” (p. 7). In this chapter Smith elaborates on Linda Williams’ work on visual representations of the excessive, spasmodic body in moments of extreme pleasure by discussing a style of performance in which the excessive, rapturous body is invisible, though certainly not inaudible.

Part two of Smith’s book focuses on a discussion of the “grain” of the voice, and more specifically how microphone technologies impacted on the aesthetics and appreciation of vocal performances by allowing audiences to hear nuances and subtleties that were previously inaudible. In chapter three, for example, Smith synthesises a wide range of research, including Allison McCracken’s work on ‘crooning’ and Roberta Pearson and Janet Staiger’s discussions of presentational and representational acting styles in order to describe how microphone technologies produced a form of ‘audio close-up’ that impacted on our ideas of what a ‘natural’ performance was, perhaps more so than the film close up. Smith argues that microphone technologies (and also the intimate contexts in which these recordings were then listened to) helped to facilitate ‘crooning’ singing styles, radio ‘fireside chats’ and ‘personalities’, and a melodramatic, intimate ‘closed-mike’ style of performance that has come to define modern acting.

Finally part three of Vocal Tracks considers the relationship between secret recording technologies and performance style, starting with a discussion of Allen Funt’s Candid Microphone (and later Candid Camera). The primary intention of these programs was, says Smith, to incite people to ‘flood out’, usually in anger. Smith argues that this style of hidden recording captured a casual and uninhibited performance that “made conventional modes of acting seemed contrived” and paved the way for the development of realist acting styles (pp. 187-8).  Even the celebrity based ‘candid camera’ style shows of more recent years delight in revealing the ‘real’ celebrity (as in Punk’d) or even the deliberate unravelling of the ‘performed self’ (as in Ali G and Borat).

As Smith explains in the introduction to his book, he is particularly interested in the protean, varied and virtuosic qualities of the human voice, a sound which can function as a musical instrument of considerable flexibility, as a conveyer of language, emotion, sensation, personal identity and – as he argues on numerous occasions – a signifier of authentic human presence. His case studies reflect this interest directly, incorporating a wide variety of vocal performances (and sound media), including recorded comedy routines, canned laughter, erotic phonograph records, radio melodrama, crooning, rasping, whispering and prank calling – only a selection of which I’ve covered in this review. The trouble with such a diversity of material is that sometimes Smith’s larger argument gets lost in the details (although they are very interesting details). As a result, the connections between the different chapters are often strained, with each feeling more like an autonomous article than part of a cohesive whole. Suggesting that a writer is perhaps trying to do too much is, as far as criticisms go, a fairly light one. The up side of such a heterogeneous and ambitious book is that, with every interesting example or observation that needed more attention and elaboration, Jacob Smith has generously supplied an opportunity for future research.

Maura Edmond,
University of Melbourne, Australia.

Created on: Tuesday, 1 December 2009