Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2025 AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Daily Overview |
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Joni Mitchell Location: Greenway Ballroom E-F Session Chair: Nancy Murphy, University of Michigan | |
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An Analysis of Joni Mitchell’s Vocal Evolution CUNY Graduate Center Joni Mitchell, known for her innovative and distinctive songwriting, possesses a highly recognizable singing voice that has undergone major sonic change throughout her career. Reviewers have made observations about how age and lifestyle have altered her voice, suggesting that these factors have worsened her voice. Most reviews have discussed Mitchell’s voice in reductive binaries of young-old and high-low pitch, frequently without specific sonic descriptors. I analyze Joni Mitchell’s pitch and vocal timbre to describe her sonic change more fully. The purpose of this research is to study vocal timbre as a dynamic and evolving element of an artist’s sound, with an emphasis on aging as a natural and complex facet of the voice. I use a mixed methods approach to: 1) analyze sung pitch ranges across Mitchell’s entire studio album output, showing that Mitchell’s vocal range lowered slightly over her career, but that the size of her range remained relatively steady; 2) compare three recordings of “A Case of You,” showing how some elements of Mitchell’s sound are invariant while others are specific to each recording, relating to vocal style, creative decisions, and physiology; 3) analyze specific vowel sounds, showing how timbre semantic descriptors are validated by the audio signal through the change of formants. I relate my analysis to statements Mitchell has made about her voice and its evolution. These results suggest that the changing features in Mitchell’s voice are not exclusively tied to age or lifestyle but indicate a decades-long process of creative decision making. These changing features need not be characterized in a negative light, and instead have valuable hermeneutic implications. Through careful examination of Mitchell’s oeuvre, this paper reveals a methodological framework for analyzing the aging voice. | |