Singing, Song, and Sound as Human Acts of Personal and Cultural Agency

Johann Gottfried Herder characterised singing and song as human acts of personal and cultural agency (Herder and Bohlman 2017). These agencies are enacted musically, centralising the idea of “performance”. In this context, “singing” refers to the act of performance, which, due to its interactive nature in real time, is the most important moment of music-making, particularly in multipart music traditions, while “song” and its emergence remain the object and subject of the act of creation. “Sound” is an indispensable part of all these processes. The perception and interpretation of these aspects by different people affect both the practice and discourse of music, shaping meaningful experiences in terms of the attitudes and cognitive processes involved in its creation (Blacking 1973).