Logo image
Back
Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards: Vocal Timbre as a Marker of Recurring Archetypal Characters in the Music of Tom Waits
Conference proceeding   Open access

Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards: Vocal Timbre as a Marker of Recurring Archetypal Characters in the Music of Tom Waits

Joshua Albrecht
Proceedings of the ICMPC-ESCOM 2018 Joint Conference, pp.5-10
2018
pdf
Albrecht3321.39 MBDownloadView
Open Access Free to read and download

Abstract

A wide range of very distinctive timbres and a high degree of theatricality characterizes Tom Waits' music. Several scholars have identified a tendency for Waits to portray fictional characters and personas in his songs, rather than the more typical approach of presenting his songs as semi-autobiographical. This study explores the hypothesis that Waits' songs can be categorized by vocal timbre into a relatively small number of subsets, and that these groups of songs represent recurring archetypal characters in Waits' output. To test this hypothesis, participants grouped 40 five-second excerpts randomly sampled from 146 of his latter-career output into as many as eight groups, and then progressively linked the most similar groups. They also provided descriptions for each of the groups. These similarity measures were used to estimate the distances between each of the songs in Waits' late career. Cluster analysis suggests the presence of 7 distinct clusters, and these clusters are supported by different timbral descriptors. Further content analysis is performed on the lyrics of these songs by clusters, but no significant ANOVAs suggest that if there are distinct characters in Waits' songs, they cannot be detected only by sentiment analysis of the lyrics.

Details

Metrics

1 File views/ downloads
1 Record Views
Logo image