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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Analysis of Popular Music I Location: Lake Bemidji Session Chair: Megan Lavengood, George Mason University | |
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Analyzing the Yodel in Popular Music University of Minnesota Trends in recent popular music are often driven by timbral and articulative practices both digital and acoustic, such as glottal stops, auto tune, or vocal flips. Mimetic analysis of timbre and vocal production in register breaking, for example (Heidemann 2016; Cox 2016; Malawey 2020), demonstrates that some examples conform to yodeling in definition and sonic practice (Platenga 2004; Baumann 2001). Yodeling is historically defined in broad and specific ways, but for the purposes of my work I define it as the practice of breaking a melodic line between chest and head/falsetto register over a single word or syllable. Following Wise 2016, I view yodeling as a verb versus a noun, allowing meaning to be strongly tied to practice. In this paper I argue that female-coded voices in popular music have redefined the yodel and its various expressive implications. I analyze sonic moments in popular music sung by female-coded voices from the last three decades to determine how yodelemes, as units of meaning (after Wise, 36), initiate cues about identity and expression. Yodelemes are defined by changes in tessitura, pitch embellishments, motility, and paralinguistic features, and these cues are tied to narrative and form-making. | |