By not lip-syncing Amy Winehouse's songs, actress Marisa Abela faces unattainable expectations in “Back to Black.”

Like Amy Winehouse: “Back to black“, the brand new biopic in regards to the late British singer, was no stranger to controversy.

In the case of the film, there was strong disagreement over director Sam Taylor-Johnson's decision to have actress Marisa Abela sing to Winehouse's recordings somewhat than lip-sync her.

Some viewers have praised Abela's voice. Others complained that she sounds “nothing like that“Winehouse or asked why anyone would even try to imitate him such a “unique” voice.

As a musicologist, the studies voice and identityI see two elements fueling this dissonance.

First, Winehouse's distinctive sound relied on her own mimicry skills: she drew from an extended history of predominantly black female singers.

Second, some viewers appear to want Abela's voice to be a duplicate of Winehouse's voice. But as I learned my researchThe art of vocal imitation is less about perfect replication; Rather, it’s most successful when performers mimic certain points of a singer's sound which might be easily recognizable to listeners.

Imitation and appropriation

Wine House, who died in 2011 At the age of 27, she didn't bring a very recent sound to the world during her short profession.

The 2006 album Back to Black, a collaboration with Mark Ronson, was deliberately a retro work. It followed Winehouse's 2003 debut album Frank and brought together vibrant sounds from soul, neo-soul, funk, jazz, blues and R&B – genres all created by black musicians and communities.

Yale professor Daphne Brooks argued that Winehouse's style took its core elements from black singers.

In Winehouse's hoarse voice, Brooks heard Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Lauryn Hill and others.

In the singer's turbulent private life, Brooks saw echoes of the blues women of the Nineteen Twenties and Nineteen Thirties who’ve suffered from addiction and trauma.

And in Winehouse's signature look – her “beehive, satin dresses and little black gloves” – Brooks saw the elegant, sophisticated girl groups of the Fifties and Sixties, equivalent to the Shirelles.

Brooks also saw parallels with Sophie Tucker, a white Jewish singer and comedian who rose to fame within the Nineteen Twenties and who, like Winehouse, made her profession borrowing from the performance variety of black singers.

Winehouse didn’t hide the incontrovertible fact that she paid homage to the music and musicians she admired. She even alluded to the difficult cultural tensions her work raised. told Hot Press in 2007 that she was all for “the old Motown, The Shangri-Las, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Ray Charles.”

Still, her critics were outspoken in regards to the appropriation in The New Yorker's “Back to Black,” featuring Sasha Frere-Jones Comparison of Winehouse's singing to “a kind of blackface.”

Frere-Jones wondered if the title “Back to Black” needs to be “literal.” Abela complicated the equation together with her added layer of impersonation: her Winehouse voice over Winehouse's own retro sound.

Capturing the “essence” of a singer

Representing a lost and treasured artist is difficult in other ways, too.

The actors are expected to do justice to the fans' memories. Lip syncing with the late celebrity's voice Naomi Ackie did it within the Whitney Houston film “I would like to bop with someone“can avoid the problem entirely. Occasionally, e.g Rami Malek's portrayal of Freddie Mercury In “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the actors lip-synch their very own voices and merge them with that of the singer they’re playing.

But directors let some actors imitate their very own voice. Renée Zellweger sang as Judy Garland in “Judy“Austin Butler sang Elvis' earlier songs himself In “Elvis.” Like her, Marisa Abela also worked closely with a singing teacher.

Coaches reject the suggestion that actors do low cost impressions or imitations.

Eric Vetro, who worked with Timothée Chalamet for the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic “An entire unknown,, said Entertainment Weekly that Chalamet “takes all of the characteristics of Dylan's voice, his mannerisms and his speech patterns and brings them into the music – in order that while you hear Timothée play the music, you actually get that Bob Dylan.”

Likewise Anne-Marie Speed, who trained Abela, said Rolling Stone“You wish to [the vocal performance] be very close, but make no impression.”

Impressionism, not replication

Actors who succeed at playing dead singers actually engage within the art of impersonation, very like the hordes of Elvis impersonators in Las Vegas. The audience knows they aren’t seeing the actual person. However, you wish the actors to acknowledge the artist's singing style, mannerisms and aura.

Ten years ago, I researched with vocal scientist Ron Scherer to seek out out what was occurring when one singer tried to sound like one other.

I interviewed and recorded Canadian singer Véronic DiCaire before a performance at her Vegas impersonation show.50 votes.” She covered a variety of singers in her impressive repertoire: Adele, Whitney Houston and even Amy Winehouse.

When impersonating Tina Turner DiCaire told me that she needed very high heels to mimic Turner's posture. When she impersonated other singers, she adjusted the a part of her vocal tract where she felt vibrations. For Céline Dion, she explained how she originally desired to locate the voice in her nose. But her teacher also identified that Dion “sings with that long neck.” Their imitation subsequently required a combination of adjustments in posture and vocal technique.

Based on the photos I took, Scherer and I compared Spectrographic images – Representations of the acoustic structure of a sound in diagram form – of DiCaire's own voice together with her imitations. We then compared their imitations with spectrographic images from the unique artists.

We discovered that DiCaire didn’t produce exact replicas of the unique vocals she covered. But she hit certain highlights of her vocal sounds, just like the pronunciation of certain vowels or consonants. She also adjusted the frequency of her vibrato — and reshaped her vocal tract — to bring her timbre closer to that of Adele or Lady Gaga at key points in a song.

A mixed review of the film “Back to Black” criticizes it as “a crude highlight reel” of Winehouse's profession, although the writer praises Abela's “good impression of the late singer.”

But our research suggests that singing imitation is just that: a highlight reel.

In an Impressionist painting, the image lies within the artist's arrangement of many details which might be best viewed from a distance. If you look too closely, all the pieces falls apart.