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Nina Eidsheim • Irna Priore Music and Culture Lecture Series
April 16, 2021 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Virtual Event
Lectures in Spring 2021 will be held online via Zoom. All lectures are free and open to the public. Please pre-register using the link below. This year’s Series will participate in the UNCG theme She Can, We Can and features research about women, gender, and/or civil rights.
Presented by the School of Music, and Musicology/Ethnomusicology and Music Theory Areas. For further information contact Joan Titus.
REGISTRATIONSHE CAN, WE CANPRIORE LECTURE SERIES
“Ime mean, I knewknow I’m was kinda tall for highasking: How we Teach Machines to Listen for (Certain) Accents to Reinforce Racism”
“Ime mean, I knewknow I’m was kinda tall for highasking: How we Teach Machines to Listen for (Certain) Accents to Reinforce Racism”
Going back to the mid-1950s, Kodak famously standardized their Shirley cards test, used to calibrate color when printing photos. Jersson Garcia who worked at a photo Lab told the NPR: “‘She was the standard’ ‘so whenever we printed anything, we had to pull Shirley in. If Shirley looked good, everything else was OK. If Shirley didn’t look so hot that day, we had to tweak something — something was wrong.’” We saw the same premise of the technology in the youtube videos that were shared in around the Christmas shopping season in 2009—HP webcams that “can’t see black people.” In this presentation I argue that in the same way as Kodak film and HP cameras were calibrated for white skin color, voice- and listening technology also carries and reproduce the same social bias, discrimination, and racism. Considering the vocal synthesis software Vocaloid, voice to text technology, and the Voice Bank Monopoly game, I consider how vocal and listening technology listens for, against, and in non-recognition of certain accents, vocal performances standing in for non-whiteness.
Nina Sun Eidsheim studied vocal performance, composition, and philosophy at the University of Agder (Norway) and The Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus (Denmark) before pursing MFA in Music at the California Institute of the Arts. She completed her Ph.D. in critical studies/experimental practices program at the University of California, San Diego. Eidsheim is the author of Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Duke University Press, 2015) and Measuring Race: the Micropolitics of Listening to Vocal Timbre and Vocality in African-American Popular Music (Duke University Press, 2019). She is also co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies and a special issue on voice and materiality for the journal, Postmodern Culture (2014).
Eidsheim’s research interests include multi-sensoriality, production and perception of vocal timbre, twentieth and twenty-first century music vocal music and opera, critical studies in race and gender, performance studies, sound studies, and voice studies. Her research has been published in journals including American Quarterly, Opera Quarterly, Current Musicology, The Senses & Society, Postmodern Culture, and TRANS-Transcultural Music Review. In addition, she co-convened the quarter long residential research group at the UC Humanities Research Institute; and is the principal investigator for the UC-wide, transdisciplinary research project entitled Keys to Voice Studies: Terminology, Methodology, and Questions Across Disciplines, and organized the international and transdisciplinary conference Voice Studies Now.
Eidsheim’s research has been supported by the Cornell University Society of the Humanities Fellowship (2011-12), the UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities (2015-16) and the ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship (2015-16), the American Musicological Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Career Enhancement Fellowship, Cornell University Society of the Humanities Fellowship, the University of California, Los Angeles, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, the UC Humanities Research Institute, the UC Institute for Research in the Arts and more. She has served on the editorial board of Twentieth-Century Music and as a book review editor for Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and is currently on the editorial board of Eventual Aesthetics, Phonoscope, and Wavefront. She founded and directs the UCLA Humanities Editor-in-Residence Distinguished Fellows Program, the quarterly UCLA Faculty Writing retreats, and the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music Postdoctoral Fellows Program. She serves on the UCLA Center for the Study of Women Advisory Committee (2017-19), the American Musicological Society Council (2017-20), and is an inaugural member and Co-Chair (with George Lewis) of the American Musicological Society’s Board Committee on Race and Ethnicity (2018-21).
Irna Priore (1963–2014) was a beloved colleague, and associate professor of music theory in the UNCG School of Music. In addition to being a flutist, she was a scholar, teacher, and mentor in music studies, and contributed publications on Luciano Berio, Darmstadt, post-1945 theory, and Brazilian popular music. Her legacy of generosity, strength, and brilliance continues through her family, friends, colleagues, and students; this series is dedicated to her and celebrates her memory.