SMT 2025 Student Presentation Award

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.

De Souza proposes that texture is a perceptual and dynamic phenomenon that emerges from interactions between notated relationships in the score and the sonic features musicians bring to life in performance (2019). This study extends and operationalizes De Souza’s account of texture, providing an empirical framework for assessing how notated textural structures are realized in performance. We worked with an expert trio from The King’s Singers who performed two madrigals with varied textures. During performance, singers continuously tracked their auditory attention and later described their attention and coordination through a video-annotation task. To trace textural dynamics, we operationalized textural stream formation through onset and text synchronization. Our analysis revealed systematic relationships between texture and attention, described through three main texture-listening modes: within, across, and global. Mode use generally aligned with the number of streams present (e.g., homophonic passages prompted the global mode and independent lines prompted the across mode), but also shifted with musical demands. By foregrounding attention, this study closely explores the dynamic nature of texture, providing new insight into how notated textures are realized in performance.

American composer and educator Howard Hanson’s 1960 treatise Harmonic Materials of Modern Music: Resources of the Tempered Scale receives scant mention in comprehensive literature reviews on pitch-class set theory. Contemporary writings by theorists George Perle (1955, 1962), David Lewin (1959, 1960), and Allen Forte (1964, 1973) historically enjoy greater circulation, reducing Hanson's treatise to a stepping-stone in set theory development (Bernard 1997). Hanson was the first to enumerate all sets under transpositional and inversional equivalence, reducing them to 224 at the 1951 general meeting of the American Philosophical Society [APS] (Cohen 2004; Verdi 2007; Berry and Van Solkema 2014). An in-progress accession order of the Howard Hanson Collection—compiled by archivist David Peter Coppen at the Sibley Music Library—presents new archival evidence that extends traditional history of theory narratives. Our findings place Hanson’s pioneering proto-set theory work in the Eastman School of Music as early as 1940, suggesting his theories were taught to a generation of composers and theorists through 1964.

Historical testimonials by composer-theorists William Bergsma and Robert V. Sutton (Russell-Williams 1988) confirm the widespread use of Hanson’s theories in Eastman classrooms. The primary focus of this paper is the undergraduate application of Hanson’s theory, with a previously unknown and unpublished projected theory textbook manuscript intended as an addition to the tenth volume of the New Scribner Music Library. Our methodology follows Charles Atkinson and Edward Nowacki’s untangling of the multiple layers of the Alia musica (Atkinson 2008; Nowacki 2020). Hanson’s 1960 text acts as the core treatise of his fully formed theory, allowing comparison between the 1960 proof copy and the 1951 APS presentation. Moreover, the core treatise provides the backdrop for the undergraduate projected theory textbook assembled between 1960 and 1966.