In early 2010, an isolated vocal track of Kurt Cobain from “Smells Like Teen Spirit” appeared online, where it was received, eagerly, as an ad-hoc corrective to contemporary pop radio. PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHEL LINSSEN / REDFERNS / GETTY

In early 2010, audio of Kurt Cobain wincing through “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—Nirvana’s first charting hit, from 1991, and a foundational text for the next few decades of punk-rock bands—suddenly appeared online. Someone had divorced the singing parts from the non-singing parts. The unaccompanied vocal quickly darted about the Web, where it was received, eagerly, as an ad-hoc corrective to the plumper and more orderly voices then pervading pop radio. Listening now, it occasionally feels as if Cobain were straining to excise something, to discharge a foreign body from his flesh by force of will alone. It’s a brutal performance, and beautiful. He doesn’t start singing until thirty-eight seconds into the song, but the track was uploaded to YouTube as a real-time expression—meaning it opens with thirty-eight consecutive seconds of vast and ghostly silence. Then you pop out of your chair.

Experiments like this have become oddly omnipresent in recent years. Following David Bowie’s death, an isolated vocal from “Under Pressure,” a duet that Bowie performed with Queen, in 1981, was resurrected as yet another example of Bowie’s extraordinary singularity and vision. While trying to imbue the tracks themselves with significance is futile—it would be like plucking a carrot medallion from a pot of stew and evaluating it as a meal—the act of segregating a vocal melody does feel germane to our cultural moment, in which decontextualization has practically become its own practice.

This is true, in part, because separating a single moment from a flow of moments often makes for a pretty good gag. Take, for example, that endlessly circulating GIF of Donald Trump, from one of the early Republican debates. His face appears pink and rubbery, contorting into a series of insane-seeming yet hilarious expressions: He mimes a disbelieving grin. He blinks and exaggeratedly jumps his eyebrows, twice. He opens his mouth as if he were slurping up some algae from the bottom of a fish tank. Perhaps we do not know or cannot recall what external stimulus he was responding to. And so we snicker with even more gusto.

Indeed, the impulse to detach a vocal from its song is not always admiring. When the isolated track is wonky and unflattering (which can happen if it’s been surreptitiously plucked from a live feed, like the audio released after Mariah Carey performed a somewhat strangled version of “All I Want for Christmas” at Rockefeller Center, in 2014), a hearty dose of schadenfreude is baked in. It becomes a way of publicly shaming artists we have already forced to wear jazzy ensembles and dance in place for our amusement. Even before the jilted had a platform like the Web—where, of course, anyone can promptly express outsized disappointment—people still found a way to guffaw at anybody unlucky enough to be busted caterwauling off-key. An isolated live track of Linda McCartney providing backing vocals to “Hey Jude,” purportedly collected by sound engineers at a Paul McCartney concert in Knebworth, England, in 1990, was passed around the industry for decades, broadcast and rebroadcast with a kind of “Look at this joker!” glee. (Paul McCartney later released video footage of the show as an explanation of sorts; in it, Linda is seen dancing, moving in a possessed way, clearly working from a place where perfect pitch likely felt like a dumb concern.)

These discarnate tracks do not usually come with extensive origin stories, although, if we are lining them up to be judged, it seems worth acknowledging the difference between a true, unedited live performance—a voice flapping nude in the breeze—and a studio track that’s merely had all other components stripped away. If the person isolating the vocal is working from a label-issued recording, that voice has probably already been aggressively filtered, or perhaps meticulously pieced together from disparate takes, sometimes even syllable by syllable.

The same goes for any musical performance, instrumental or otherwise, that has been rendered in a proper studio—although, interestingly, with just a handful of exceptions, the isolated-track wormhole echoes only with disembodied human voices. It is far less common to see a bass line or a guitar riff tugged from context and trotted out with zeal as an Example of Something. But why pull one string and not another? What’s in a voice, alone? What’s in a voice, ever?

A lot, if you are prone to reading music criticism. Anyone would be right to indict contemporary critics for their overreliance on lyrics for polemical fodder; writers tend to bore down on words (and their delivery) in part because it’s widely presumed that scribbled-and-sung lyrics are where the real humanity lurks. Trained to sniff out emotional breaches like a German shepherd in a K-9 vest, stalking a kilo of weed at the airport, critics use those revelations to build meaning, to make internal sense of art. (There is also the problem of relaying theory on the page in a way that doesn’t feel tedious, or willfully obtuse.) The accompanying instrumentation is not incidental, exactly, but its role is often diminished. Sometimes, with some artists, this is fair. Other times, it’s less fair.

Proponents of instrumental genres will and should guffaw at the notion that parsing sung or spoken language is the only or best way to do serious critical work, and at the presupposition that non-verbal compositions are somehow less narrative or revealing. They are not: anyone who has ever listened to an enduring instrumental piece like, say, Beethoven’s Ninth understands it as inherently communicative, regardless of circumstance or socialization. It has lasted in this way and on this scale because it plainly—though not simply—transmits a story that resonates, and is useful for us to hear. Anyone who has ever listened to “Mingus Ah Um,” or to the guitar figures of John Fahey, or to Santo and Johnny’s “Sleep Walk,” or to any number of devastating instrumental recordings, understands this on some level. Likewise, anyone who has watched someone else’s face collapse wordlessly—or felt her own face crumple, felled by some airless punch—understands it, too. Without words, big things still get imparted.

But the meaning of language is preordained and theoretically immovable; even at their most arcane and nonsensical, lyrics are often the less ambiguous tool. Melody can very efficiently relay blunt feelings—the simplest example being a song written in a major key (happy) versus a minor key (sad)—but a raw vocal track almost inevitably contains multitudes.

So what do we learn, hearing all those words and breaths and gurgles, unencumbered? The voice is our most primordial and valuable instrument, and we respond to it more fully, in both spiritual and physiological ways, than almost any other organic sound. For millennia, our brains have evolved to perceive minute variations in the volume and cadence of a human voice. Those micro-adjustments can be staggering, and are worth listening for. Who among us does not have a friend or lover capable of announcing some seismic shift in the shared dynamic via a barely perceptible change in tone?

And while “Let’s find the blood and bones in this magic, and make sense of it that way” is perhaps a generous take on the trend of the isolated vocal, I like to think that it’s just one of countless ways listeners find to mediate the experience of music—to dissect it as a way of understanding it, of understanding anything at all about being alive, like a sixth grader taking a scalpel to a frog’s undercarriage. Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s just funny, hearing Kurt Cobain holler a nasal “Haaay!” apropos of no apparent impetus. Maybe it just brings him a little bit closer, a pure signal through the haze.