Guest Lecture: Yodels and Whispers — Singing Feminism in Recent Popular Music.
Alyssa Barna will present a lecture entitled Yodels and Whispers: Singing Feminism in Recent Popular Music.
Developments in popular music are often driven by timbral and articulative practices, both digital and acoustic. Female-coded voices, in particular, have driven recent trends such as whisperpop or vocal flips that are widely heard across professional records and in DIY online music-making (e.g., TikTok). Using the mimetic analysis of vocal physiology and focusing on the timbre of these voices, in this presentation I argue that several female-coded artists in popular music have worked to reclaim the various expressive implications of their instrument through virtuosic techniques like whisper singing and yodeling. The techniques require extreme vocal prowess, but the public reception of these techniques, historically and presently, has often been negative. I analyze sonic moments in popular music sung by female-coded voices from the last three decades to determine how these techniques, while sometimes coded as a gendered “other,” demonstrate feminist vocal empowerment.
Alyssa Barna is a music theorist interested in the analysis of form, timbre, and the voice in recent popular music. As a public music theorist, she aims to share theory and analysis with broader audiences and her current work in pedagogy focuses on connecting theory with technology, media, and culture. Barna is an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where she has taught since 2019.
This event is free and open to the public
