Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:58:28am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Sounding the Other Session Chair: Mike Levine | |
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“Sure Looks Strange to Me”: Chipmunk Voices and Uncanniness in 1950’s Novelty Music University of Michigan In 1958, amid growing racial tensions surrounding desegregation and Cold War era fear-mongering, radio waves in the US were inundated by an influx of novelty hits featuring sped- and pitched-up vocals, which take on a bright, unnatural, and nasally character due to the tape speed manipulation. Bookending this trend were two songs written and performed by Ross Bagdasarian at independent label Liberty Records: “Witch Doctor” and “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late).” The former, released in January, kickstarted the trend with its sped- and pitched-up doctor, a jumbled, exoticized stereotype of pseudo-shamanist practices giving love advice in gibberish syllables. The latter, released in December, was the debut of fictional singing trio Alvin and the Chipmunks, who became so inextricably linked to the sound of sped- and pitched up voices that they gave the effect the name by which it is now known: the chipmunk voice. Along with Sheb Wooley’s “Purple People Eater,” about a seemingly threatening but harmless rock n’ roll alien, these were the massive hits of the sped-up craze of 1958, where what would come to be known as the chipmunk voice was used to signify cartoon animals, alien creatures, and people of color indiscriminately. This paper traces how the sped-up voice became a site for performing and dehumanizing racial Otherness in the US in the late 1950’s. Building on Nina Sun Eidsheim’s work on Blackness and vocality as well as Steven Connor’s notion of vocalic bodies, I consider how the uncanniness of the sped- and pitched-up voice, which on its own might provoke unease in listeners, prompted artists to provide imagined vocalic bodies that would seem both strange and nonthreatening, conflating people of color with animals and aliens. I argue that this sped-up craze provided a vehicle for voicing, mocking, and dehumanizing “strangeness” during the struggle for civil rights for people of color in the US and in wake of the McCarthy era, where those in power cast identity-based and ideological difference as threatening to the American way of life. | |