The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music by Professor Nina Sun Eidsheim opens with four distinct epigraphs. The first is from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, as Juliet ponders the distinct sound of Romeo, a Montague. The second is a quote on tone from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The third is from the court record of the 1995 California v. O.J. Simpson trial, quoting the prosecutor’s line of questioning that the voice heard was that of a ‘black man’. The final and perhaps most striking is a quote from Ralph Nader to the ‘Rocky Mountain News’ radio station in 2008 opining that President Obama is ‘talk[ing] white’. The astonishing thoughtlessness and callousness of this statement with all its imposed racialisms, prejudices and assumptions frames the radical, questioning tone that the book sets forth on voice, race and identity. How does one talk white? How does one sound white? The complex, structural nature of race and sound are often conflated. The Race of Sound seeks to address this conjecture, carefully crafting an argument against sonic essentialism, against the notion of an essential Black ‘voice’. To put succinctly, the book seeks to expose, unpick and problematise the racialisation of sound.

中文翻译：

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Nina Sun Eidsheim撰写的主题书评：声音竞赛：非裔美国人音乐中的聆听，音色和声音

Nina Sun Eidsheim教授的《非裔美国人的音乐中的声音竞赛：听力，音色和声音》以四个不同的题词开头。首先是威廉·莎士比亚（William Shakespeare）的《罗密欧与朱丽叶》（Romeo and Juliet），朱丽叶（Juliet）思考着蒙塔古（Montague）罗密欧（Romeo）独特的声音。第二个是Monty Python的《飞行马戏团》中的语调。第三点来自1995年加州诉OJ辛普森（OJ Simpson）案的法庭记录庭审中，引用检察官的质询表述，听到的声音是“黑人”的声音。最后，也许最引人注目的是拉尔夫·纳德（Ralph Nader）在2008年对“落基山新闻”广播电台的一句话，说奥巴马总统是“在说白话”。这份声明以其所有强加的种族主义，偏见和假设而出人意料的无情和冷酷无情，构成了本书关于声音，种族和身份的激进，令人质疑的基调。一个人怎么说白？一个听起来如何白色？种族和声音的复杂，结构性经常混为一谈。声音竞赛试图解决这个猜想，精心提出反对声音本质主义，反对基本黑人“声音”概念的论点。简而言之，该书试图揭露，消除和消除声音的种族化问题。