The Musicality of the Voice in Contemporary Television

This chapter proposes a framework for exploring the musicality of the voice in contemporary television. By rising to a challenge set by Claudia Gorbman and further developing Danijela Kulezic-Wilson’s investigation of the musicalization of speech, a variety of computational tools will be used to analyze musical features such as timbre, pitch, rhythm, repetition, phrasing, and punctuation. Analysis of vocal exemplars will build towards a Repetition, Interruption, Punctuation (RIP) schematic as a means of understanding the musical flow of dialogue. This shows how the overarching organizational structure can generate pleasure that is similar to listening to a highly skilled musical ensemble and how the musicality of speech generates an affective core in contemporary television. The joyous complexity of peak TV encourages a renewed appreciation of the musicality of the voice which functions as a form of affective operational aesthetics.