Coming in the wake of the rich crop of recent studies on the voice (Rudent Reference Rudent, Rudent and Chabot-Canet2020), this book constitutes a solid overview of the field. A theoretical introduction is followed by four thematic chapters – on pitch, prosody, quality and mediation with technology – and a final chapter devoted to three songs by Elliott Smith. The earlier chapters focus on Leonard Cohen's ‘Hallelujah’, Justin Timberlake's ‘Cry Me a River’, The Cliks/Lucas Silveira and Björk.
Throughout the study, vocal characteristics are established by comparing the original versions of the songs with covers, using analysis based on conventional transcriptions and spectrograms. The stated objective is to help readers understand how the vocal features that they observe (a checklist is provided on p. 148) are linked to ‘the meanings listeners ascribe to songs’ (p. 26 et passim). However, by focusing – like so many other studies – on the elucidation of these meanings, the book almost completely neglects stylistic analysis, in spite of the rich potential that the latter holds for the analysis of the voice in song.
Malawey's book has many strengths, the most obvious one being that it considers the voice in all its dimensions, adopting a holistic approach. More importantly, it departs from the well-beaten path to explore new avenues of research. Notable in this respect is its development of the notion of connectivity (‘inter and intra-phrase connectivity’, p. 71), along with a proposal for an effective means of notation: broken brackets for discontinuity and solid brackets for continuity (p. 152–3). There can be no doubt that this family of vocal characteristics often slips under the radar of song analysis, despite being one of the clearest differentiating features for the listener: to use examples drawn from French popular music, it is what immediately differentiates Serge Gainsbourg, Georges Brassens and Juliette Gréco (discontinuity) on the one hand from Edith Piaf, Charles Aznavour and Barbara (continuity) on the other. The notion of vocal motility (the ‘capacity for agility, singing passages with apparent ease and fluidity’, p. 79) is equally interesting, and serves to link phenomena which are usually considered in isolation. It can manifest itself in different forms: some artists possess a melismatic facility, while others are able to use a wide range of vocal registers and further vocal traits can also be involved. The analysis of note placement with respect to the downbeat (p. 153) and syncopated rhythms (pp. 162–3) is convincing and well argued, providing a harmonious counterpoint to Dai Griffiths’ (Reference Griffiths and Moore2008 [2003]) now classic remarks. The work on ‘pressed (tense) phonation’ and ‘breathy (lax) phonation’ (pp. 102–10) is also particularly helpful, despite being based largely on perception, which is always liable to vary from one listener to another. Another pair of notions, however, comes across as less useful and somewhat confused, namely the distinction between a ‘wet’ and ‘dry spectrum’ in the post-production processes applied to voice tracks: presented on p. 127, this notion is illustrated by a highly debatable diagram on p. 128. It does, however, enable the author to put forward a welcome critique of the notion of ‘naturalness’ and of what we do or do not perceive as ‘technological’ (pp. 130, 145). Malawey is also especially perspicacious when she breaks free from lyrical normativity, such as in her comments on ‘breathy’ voices (p. 159). All told, her observational approach gives rise to some productive analysis and some very convincing conclusions on the vocality of Björk (pp. 140–6) and Elliott Smith (final chapter), with some skilful inclusion of harmonic considerations.
Turning to the book's limitations, it is to be noted that, while the musical transcriptions are clear, the spectrograms are, in contrast, fairly hard to decipher. The scales chosen are unsuited to the passages being analysed (the frequency scale is always identical and almost impossible to read), they lack graphic annotations and the time gradations (on the horizontal axis) are not marked. Seemingly derived from colour spectrograms transferred into black and white for publication, their contrast and definition are rather poor. Even a reader familiar with this kind of graphic will be unable to find what the author says these spectrograms show. No explanation of how to interpret them is provided for the novice.
Specialists in voice studies, meanwhile, will find the argument rather confused in places: the four main categories under study – pitch, prosody, quality and technology – come across as somewhat vague and act as barriers to the thought process instead of clarifying it. Why, for instance, talk about registers in the chapter on pitch? ‘Intensity’ is defined in a way that is impossible to use (p. 137), while ‘quality’ becomes a catch-all term designating ‘timbre, phonation, grain, onset, aspiration, resonance, clarity, nasality, twang, paralinguistic features, and vocal effects’ (p. 94).
While Malawey provides a wide-ranging literature review, for the most part ending in 2016, some interesting European research is missing from it, including German work on vocalmetrics (Berndt et al. Reference Berndt, Groh, Hahnel, Marx, Pfeiderer, Schonfeld, Auhagen, Bullerjahn and von Georgi2015) and the many French studies in this area (Castellengo et al. Reference Castellengo, Heinrich and Roubeau2009; Chabot-Canet Reference Chabot-Canet, Joubert and Le Touzé2015). Conversely, while Roland Barthes undoubtedly deserves our admiration, it really is time to leave his ambiguous and unusable text on the grain of the voice in peace: it adds nothing to our understanding of the voice in pop, except for a fundamental misinterpretation of the term ‘grain’ (Rudent Reference Rudent, Rudent and Chabot-Canet2020). Above all, Malawey fails to position her references within their disciplinary context: she juxtaposes sometimes incompatible definitions and statements without either questioning them or defining her own stance, frequently giving one the impression of reading a set of revision notes for a course that one has not attended.
Given that no explicit criteria are provided regarding the choice of examples for analysis, the preponderance of male artists appears arbitrary, although the focus over two chapters on a transgender man, Lucas Silveira, is particularly interesting.
Likewise, the corpus consists exclusively of English-language songs. A further limitation thus concerns readers who are not native English speakers. Malawey sometimes goes into some depth in her study of the sounds of the language (p. 178) and of twang; however, the popular singing voice does not sing exclusively in English. This is a recurrent problem affecting research worldwide, but no less important for that. When do English-speaking experts ever read general studies written in languages other than English? What biases arise from this one-way dissemination of knowledge? To what extent are good ideas from the rest of the world going ignored?
Finally, the objective of elucidating meanings is not pursued in its full complexity; for instance, in Chapter 6 the link between voice and emotions is rather clumsily described. As for the meanings that listeners ascribe to songs, which are by definition as varied as the listeners themselves, these are assumed without enough reflexive process or methodological justification: Tagg's ideas on codal (in)competence have not been used, and his long chapter on the voice (Tagg Reference Tagg2012) is strangely absent from the otherwise copious bibliography.
