The fetishized singing voice loses its own magic and becomes imitation of celebrity.

Evidence

If one dares even in conversation to question the decisive importance of the voice and to assert that it is just as possible to make beautiful music with a moderately good voice as it is on a moderately good piano, one will immediately find oneself faced with a situation of hostility and aversion whose emotional roots go far deeper than the occasion. Voices are holy properties like a national trademark. As if the voices wanted to revenge themselves for this, they begin to lose the sensuous magic in whose name they are merchandised. Most of them sound like imitations of those who have made it, even when they themselves have made it. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 78

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• SEED: Angle: run this against Auto-Tune-era vocal production — the voice as ‘national trademark’ / property whose commodity-status hollows out its expressiveness. Also a strong throughline to modern vocal-identity debates.

Related

• The singing voice is the most versatile of all musical instruments (similarity 0.79)