{"id":111489,"date":"2017-11-30T11:08:30","date_gmt":"2017-11-30T16:08:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=111489"},"modified":"2018-07-27T14:55:03","modified_gmt":"2018-07-27T18:55:03","slug":"what-i-mean-when-i-say-gina-fatone-and-utterance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2017\/11\/30\/what-i-mean-when-i-say-gina-fatone-and-utterance\/","title":{"rendered":"What I Mean When I Say: Gina Fatone and ‘utterance’"},"content":{"rendered":"

For most of us, an utterance is a spoken expression. Ralph Waldo Emerson, describing the impulse to share a religious belief, said that “if utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man.”<\/span><\/p>\n

For Gina Fatone, <\/span>an ethnomusicologist<\/span><\/a> who studies the psychology of music transmission, the term is both broader and more specific: Utterances \u201cinclude physical gestures as well as vocalizations of all sorts,\u201d she says. \u00a0\u201cThey are multimodal, and can include non-linguistic thought and communication.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

At a rehearsal of the Bates Gamelan Orchestra in February, Associate Professor of Music Gina Fatone gives cues to Jade Donaldson ’18 of Wayne, N.J.<\/p><\/div>\n

An associate professor of music, Fatone studies how people learn to play musical instruments and the intersection of music, gesture, and cognition. Her use of the term \u201cutterance,\u201d she says, is borrowed from gesture studies, where it typically describes a unit of communication.<\/span><\/p>\n

The word “utterance” gets at something we often take for granted, Fatone says: that learning to play an instrument doesn\u2019t always involve actually playing the instrument. <\/span>Conducting-like gestures \u2014 utterances made with the hands by teachers \u2014 helps musicians find a more expressive way to play, creating a neurological connection between motion and sound. <\/span><\/p>\n

Many teachers also use metaphors to get certain sounds out of their students. \u201cThere\u2019s the image of stretching and relaxing an elastic band to get at a more pliable rhythm, for example,\u201d Fatone says. It\u2019s a metaphor valuable for students who are a bit too dependent on the metronome.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fatone shares another example: how people learn the <\/span>tabla<\/span><\/a>, a South Asian drum played in pairs. Traditionally, before they\u2019re even allowed to touch the drums, tabla learners have to be able to speak what they\u2019re going to play, using a specialized system of vocables that represent drum strokes.<\/span><\/p>\n

From there, \u201ctheir hands can much more easily utter the correct sounds on the instrument, because learning the voice of the drum with their own voice first has embedded the music in their system in a highly nuanced way that\u2019s very salient,\u201d Fatone says. <\/span><\/p>\n

The utterances, in this case, are both the vocalizations \u2014 the singing \u2014 and the playing of the drums themselves. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey can be conflated in our minds and our bodies so that we experience them as one unitary utterance,\u201d she says. <\/span><\/p>\n

Defining utterances more broadly, in other words, show us that music is more than sound. It\u2019s where images, thought, and body come together in one expression. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For most of us, an utterance is a spoken expression. For Bates ethnomusicologist Gina Fatone, the term is both broader and more specific.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1005,"featured_media":111548,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,11010,14],"tags":[3846,10116],"class_list":["post-111489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-arts","category-faculty-staff","tag-gina-fatone","tag-what-i-mean-when-i-say"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1005"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111489"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117371,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111489\/revisions\/117371"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}