…just consider how much is conveyed by the tone of a voice, irrespective of the semantic content that it carries. The precise corporeal-emotional charge conveyed from one body to another by the relative tension of mouth and vocal chords is exactly what the term ‘affect’ best designates, and this is also exactly what the ‘grain of the voices’ confers. It is clear enough that affect is precisely music’s domain, while music is the cultural practice which deals most directly in the production, orchestration, repetition and interruption of affects.

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