{"product_id":"voice-machines-bonnie-gordon-9780226825144","title":"Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn exploration of the castrato as a critical provocation to explore the relationships between sound, music, voice instrument, and machine.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Constructed through surgical alteration and further modified by rigorous training, castrati inhabited human bodies that had been \"mechanized\" to produce sounds in ways that unmechanized bodies could not. The voices of these technologically enhanced singers, with their unique timbre, range, and strength, contributed to a dramatic expansion of musical vocabulary and prompted new ways of imagining sound, the body, and personhood. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Connecting sometimes bizarre snippets of history, this multi-disciplinary book moves backward and forward in time, deliberately troubling the meaning of concepts like \"technology\" and \"human.\" \u003ci\u003eVoice Machines\u003c\/i\u003e attends to the ways that early modern encounters and inventions--including settler colonialism, emergent racialized worldviews, the printing press, gunpowder, and the telescope--participated in making castrati. In Bonnie Gordon's revealing study, castrati serve as a critical provocation to ask questions about the voice, the limits of the body, and the stories historians tell.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Bonnie Gordon\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0226825140\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780226825144\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University of Chicago Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 05\/31\/2023\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 432\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.45lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.10h x 6.00w x 1.20d","brand":"Bonnie Gordon","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":44069594136831,"sku":"9780226825144","price":55.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_5d3e0cee-0d57-4b6d-86a6-cfaaaccf1b3e.jpg?v=1685425515","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/voice-machines-bonnie-gordon-9780226825144","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}