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Voice leading is the musical art of combining sounds over time. This book offers an accessible account of the cognitive and perceptual foundations of voice leading. Drawing on decades of scientific research, explanations are provided for many practices and phenomena, including the perceptual dominance of the highest voice, chordal-tone doubling, direct octaves, embellishing tones, and the musical feeling of sounds “leading” somewhere. The traditional rules of voice leading are shown to align almost perfectly with modern scientific accounts of auditory perception. Expanding beyond chorale-style writing, the book shows how established perceptual principles can be used to compose, analyze, and critically understand any kind of acoustical texture from tune-and-accompaniment songs and symphonic orchestration to jazz combo arranging and abstract electroacoustic music. Finally, the book also reviews pertinent research establishing the role of learning and enculturation in auditory and musical perception.

Moved by Aboriginal or Indigenous understandings of tracks, Norie Neumark’s Voicetracks seeks to deepen understandings of voice through listening to a variety of media and contemporary art works from Australia, Europe, and the United States. The author aims to bring voice studies into conversation with new materialism to broaden thinking within both. Through a methodology based in listening, she brings theories of affect and carnal and situated knowledge into conversation with her examples and the theories she works with. Through her examples, Neumark engages with artists working with animal sounds and voices; voices of place, placed voices in installation works; voices of technology; and “unvoicing,” disturbances in the image/voice relationship and in the idea of what voice is. Neumark evokes both the literal—the actual voices within the works with which she engages—and the metaphorical—in a new materialist exploration of voice encompassing humans, animals, things, and assemblages. Not content with the often dry tone of academic writing, the author engages a “wayfaring” process that brings together theories from sound, animal, and posthuman studies in order to change the ways we think about and act with and within the assemblages of living creatures, things, places and histories around us. Finally, she considers ethics and politics, and describes how her own work has shaped her understandings and apprehensions of voice.