Voice Studies

In her close professional relationship to composers, such as Luciano Berio, John Cage, Hans Werner Henze, Igor Stravinsky and Sylvano Bussotti, Cathy Berberian has productively tainted historical preconceptions about the authorial “work” and the role of the singer in the realization of the composer’s creation. Her flamboyant character on the concert stage, where she showcased her more popular work, captured the public’s imagination. The success of this performer–audience rapport was intrinsic to the singer’s performative persona; however Pieter Verstraete argues that through her own composed work ("Stripsody" is the best known), Berberian presented a myriad of personas. She achieved this primarily by deconstructing her own voice as instrument and object, thereby subverting the stability of her relationship to the authorial power of the musical score. Consequently, Berberian’s work invites us to rethink the authorial position of the composer in relation to the singer/performer as well as the enhanced position of the listener whose function it is to imagine such personas in relation to seeing and hearing the performer’s singing body over a number of changing instances.

Voila plus de 5 ans maintenant qu'a vu le pur I'lSMMS (International Society for Metal Music Studies), association Internationale cristallisant une dynamique collective de recherches en sciences humaines et sociales sur le hard rock, le heavy metal et le metal par des rencontres et echanges reguliers. Apres les Etats-Unis, la Finlande et le Canada, la France accueillera done cette annee le quatrieme colloque de reference des metal studies. Rendez-vous du 17 au 20 juin 2019 au Lieu Unique, scene nationale de Nantes pour cet evenement d'ampleur qui regroupera des chercheurs venus de 25 pays differents et issus de disciplines aussi diverses que la sociologie, la musicologie, I'histoire, le droit, la litterature ou les gender studies. A partir de ta thematique « locating heavy metal », I'idee est de discuter des analyses situees, realisees a partir d'enquetes de terrain ou d'etudes de corpus. Abstracts are presented following the schedule In italic, papers given in French with English translation and Powerpoint support in English.

This is the programme of a two-day praxical symposium that took place at East 15 Acting School, London (19-20 July 2019). It was the culminating event of a wider research project, the main outcome of which will be a volume for Routledge Voice Studies Series (2020). The gathering was developed upon activities offered by the majority of the contributors to the project, a group of world-leading pioneers in teaching, researching and disseminating the significance of somatic or somatically-inspired practices towards new research methodologies in somatic and voice studies.

my somatic voice is. Concept by Christina Kapadocha. Co-designed with Vivianna Chiotini. © Christina Kapadocha. Christina Kapadocha (PhD) is a Lecturer in Theatre and Movement at East 15 Acting School. She is a London-based theatre and somatic practitioner-researcher and founder of Somatic Acting Process®. Her current practice research and publications introduce new discussions on the somatic in theatre and performance studies.

This piece offers an ethnographic account of work undertaken to bridge neurotypical and neurodivergent communities in Limerick, Ireland, through music-making workshops. By harnessing a common musical heritage in traditional Irish folk music, specifically its participatory dynamics, and its emphasis on story-telling, dialogue and inclusion, participants were able to musicalize their identities in ways that resonated with the integrative spirit of neurodiversity, against the logics of neurotypical, able-bodied assimilation.

This chapter in the collection, Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary (Bloomsbury, 2018, eds. Maria Pramaggiore and Annabelle Honess Roe), explores the problematics of vocal materiality in recent and contemporary mockumentary film and television through close analyses of "gay voices" in Christopher Guest's Waiting for Guffman (1997) and the contemporary sitcom Modern Family (2009-present).

Ways of Voice explores techniques of voice production in North India, from Bollywood to raga music to ghazal to devotional hymns and Sufi song. The voices in play here are not merely given, but achieved. Singers consciously train themselves to cultivate characteristic vocal gaits, sonorities, and poetic attunements; they adopt postures of the vocal apparatus; they build habits of listening, temporality, and social relations. The action in Ways of Voice revolves around several dozen North Indian popular, devotional, classical, and folk singers engaged in projects of vocal striving. Like most singers, they are strategically working on changing, refining, and making their own voices. The book thus highlights the ways in which singers not only "have" voice, but actively acquire, cultivate and contest particular vocal dispositions for particular kinds of listeners. In framing a "Hindustani vocal ecumene" that encompasses a diverse range of classical, popular, and spiritual-devotional musical styles and practices, it offers an expansive look at ways of voice that extend far beyond commonsense boundaries of genre and place. A rich archive of audio and video examples are provided on the online companion site.

Drawing on a case study of African American countertenor Patrick Dailey and an ethnography of his live performance, this chapter is an ethnomusicological assessment of his social and theological navigation of gendered vocal sound. African American gospel singing challenges the binary gender framework that the American public expects, with men singing low and women singing high. As a man who sings high, Dailey has to demonstrate performance competence in African American worship. Dailey deftly negotiates the tensions and intersections between these dual processes of musical performance. He does so with an aspiration to deliver a presentation that is what he refers to as “anointed”: music that is from and for God. Dailey’s performance also engages African American audiences’ various types of cultural familiarity to portray competency as a worship leader and trained artist. Thus, while making a mark in sacred music history, more generally, Patrick Dailey’s performance reveals the subtle ways Western art music conventions of classifying vocalists are utilized and revised in the interpretation of cross-cultural performance in African American churches.

Anachronism Effects: Ventriloquism and Popular Media, argues that the seemingly outmoded cultural phenomenon of ventriloquism is a key site for understanding Western anxieties about media and mediation at the turn of the twenty-first century. Ventriloquism achieved mainstream popularity in the Vaudevillian era through its comedic dramatizations of the foibles of everyday communication. Subsequently translated into the audiovisual contexts of phonography, film, and television, the art boasts a growing plethora of media afterlives, while also serving as political shorthand for the mechanical reproduction of another’s speech. Anachronism Effects insists that ventriloquism’s circulation as a popular metaphor, and continued prevalence as a form of contemporary entertainment, offers a unique template for tracing the transmissions of power and knowledge through diverse media platforms, as well as through racialized, gendered, and queer bodies, in the information age—even as the practice continues to evoke the cultural detritus of a prior historical moment.

Anachronism Effects thus attends to the myriad ways in which ventriloquism has evolved as a distinct cultural object, as the art of “saying what people want to say but can’t say” by displacing this unspeakable or unsavory speech onto a dummy. From the radically race-critical 1970s vinyl record albums of the African-American ventriloquist duo Richard and Willie; to the late 1980s-early 1990s lip-synch scandal wrought by the “ventriloquism” of the Afro-German pop group Milli Vanilli; to the contemporary televisual, cinematic, and multimedia performances of the self-deprecating British ventriloquist Nina Conti and her jingoistic American counterparts Terry Fator and Jeff Dunham, the project’s case studies illuminate what it means to “vent” in both senses of the term, particularly in the context of the perceived dynamics of silencing or “correctness” that often accompanies contemporary political discourse. The dissertation’s initial case studies notably coalesce around highly politicized celebrations of national history (the mid-1970s U.S. Bicentennial, the early 1990s “reunification” of Germany), while its later chapters take up post-9/11 U.S. fantasies of a return to a folkloric national past. In each instance, ventriloquism’s play with the alignments and disconnections between body and voice enacts a material working-through of the temporal contradictions elided by national historical discourses.

Focusing on videos created in response to the viral film trailer “2 Girls 1 Cup” (2007), I argue that reaction videos as a genre showcase the power of the voice to demonstrate the authenticity of the reactor’s response and perform affective labor. The screams and squees in reaction videos, which invoke the discursive connection between girlishness and spectacular emotional displays, attempt to counter the perceived immateriality, placelessness, and shareability of digital labor by situating that labor within an individual body and naturalizing it as visceral and spontaneous.

Wlodzimierz Staniewski, director of the Polish Centre for Theatre Practices Gardzienice, considers directing as a praxis pertaining to the field of musical composition. His pieces have been theorised as either “ethno-oratoria” or “village operas,” while the pedagogy developed by the group is a territory for the exploration of the tensions between the physical and the vocal. Building on my recent fieldwork with the company, this chapter problematizes the separation of vocality and choreographic/movement practices in performer training and uses Gardzienice’s example as a case study in physiovocality. Meanwhile, the core principles of Staniewski’s work, namely mutuality, musicality and chorality, are analyzed as points of departure from music theaters towards a theater of musicality.

Na contramão da ‘doçura’ do canto polifémico de um Góngora ou do gigante camoniano, neste ‘canto’ ciclópico do poema «Polifemo» em pauta – mortalmente determinado – é uma morte mesquinha a que é doada. O «olho mineiro» de Polifemo – «olho intrusivo»  –, como no-lo dispõe o poema em pauta, «domina o mar»: contém o incontido. Ora, pela intrusão ciclópica, a axialidade do cosmos colapsa pelo ‘choque’ do vertical e do horizontal, que se contaminam até à indiferenciação. Assim, a ascensionalidade sublunar do «Passo firme» é aposta ao descendimento celeste de «nuvens que caem». O descordo, também ‘estranho’, também ‘brutal’, é replicado nessa dominação que concorre com a indiferença. O ‘mar’ que Polifemo ‘domina’ – ou pelo qual é ‘dominado’ – é, como lemos no poema, um «mar silente». Igualmente mudo, o de Polifemo é ‘canto sem canto’.

Gil Vicente é a figura maior do teatro português e a amplíssima tradição crítica dos chamados estudos vicentinos foi coagulando a imagem de um dramaturgo, encenador, contra-regra, compositor musical e actor que ocupa um lugar fundacional no teatro da comunidade interliterária luso-espanhola ibérica, 1 onde ombreia com nomes tão importantes como Juan del Encina ou Lucas Fernández, embora deles se afaste progressivamente, numa deriva que comuta um inicial pendor pastoril e religioso por uma criação dominada pela sátira moralizante e de pendor alegórico. Lembremos o comentário coevo de Garcia de Resende, o compilador do Cancioneiro Geral, que, referindo-se ao pioneirismo do dramaturgo, afirmou: "ele foy ho que inventou | isto caa, com mais graça e mais doutrina". 2 'Graça' e 'doutrina' são atributos da arte vicentina: inventiva natural que faz rir -o famigerado veio cómico vicentino, com restos algo amortecidos de 'carnavalização' -, mas que não deixa de supor formação e doutrina, conhecimento aplicado e uma robusta visão moral do mundo. Gil Vicente é, sem assomo de dúvida, um nome com assento na história do teatro europeu, ibérico e português -cujos antecedentes medievais de índole dramática, antecessores quer religiosos quer profanos, acomoda e transforma: moralidades, mistérios, milagres, farsas, momos ou entremeses, por exemplo.

During the last ten years, somaesthetics has been increasingly applied in studies of music, sound, and the voice. In this overview, I will map out the most interesting articles and books in this field after briefly introducing somaesthetics and considering how its various dimensions could be utilized in issues related to sound and music. In addition, I will discuss the role of the body in previous academic approaches to music. In the first main section of the article, I will introduce some texts by Richard Shusterman, the developer of somaesthetics, in which he deals with music, sound, and the voice. After that, I will present the writings of other scholars who apply somaesthetics in their music-, sound-, and voice-related approaches. This article is intended to give an overview, not to comprehensively deal with the content of these texts, and to offer some entry points for readers interested in applying somaesthetics to research and/or artistic practices involving music, sound, and the voice.

The sonic-social relationships of people singing together, chanting, or engaged in group vocality are underrepresented in voice, sound, and music studies. Work on the voice tends to focus on individual voices, despite the human commonplace of group singing, choric chanting, and joint speech. This article brings into conversation practice-based, ethnographic, and theoretical perspectives on chorality to mark a noteworthy constellation of interdisciplinary work on voice; decolonial, antiracist, and LGBTQ+ activism; crowds and masses; intimate publics; and democratic politics. Writing in 2021 at a moment when voices joined in chants and anthems of protest assume tragic urgency, and when chanting and singing together risk physical and social violence and the transmission of COVID-19, the authors fix their attention on sonic-social relationships in chorality in order to set down how the precarity of this moment can translate into new thinking about joint voicing. In the case studies at the heart of this article, the authors offer four frames for approaching sonic-social relationships in chorality-activist choirs, collegiate a cappella, call-response singing, and virtual choirs. They advocate for a both-and approach to the sonic-social relationship in chorality: Sound qualities matter, often urgently, as does chorality's social power to include, capture, and exclude. Ultimately, the article stresses that chorality is ethically neutrala key methodological consideration in encountering chorality. What emerges from chorality's sonic-social relationships, then, is the presence or absence of care-care for the effects of chorality's uplift or harm, carelessness with chorality's difference-leveling potentials, and chorality as an upwelling of care.

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In international research and theatre practice, voice has returned as a problem and as a question mark. This article locates ‘absolute presuppositions’ (according to Collingwood) that have defined the way voice has been treated and staged, and counter-proposes 4 theses towards redefining voice: moving away from logocentric metaphysics; turning towards the material body that produces voice and the intersections of its identities; focusing on the area of the ‘vocal in-between’; and approaching voice as event, process and multiplicity. The epistemic strategy advanced in the article is the parallel discussion of theoretical lines of argumentation within interdisciplinary voice studies and cases studies from music, theatre and sound performance as well as systems of voice pedagogy. In this way, the embodied, materially enjoyable, intersubjective and multiply constructed voice is proposed as a field that is yet-to-come but ripe for further exploration. The writing style deployed in the article is ‘emphonic’: a manifesto-list, first-person quotes, hyperlinks, direct questions, and a playlist are mined as opportunities to restore vocality in the realm of research publication. Overall, the article argues that re-examining voice in the above-mentioned ways cultivates opportunities to break away from what has been constituted as vocally self-evident, in theatre and beyond.
• The English translation of the 4 theses proposed (4th page of this version of the article, p. 24 of the published article) is:
4 THESES ON VOICE
1. Voice is not—primarily or exclusively—the bearer of linguistic meaning.
2. Current research is moving away from the universal, abstract ‘I’ of voicing and towards voice as sensed materiality, as well as towards the various intersections of its embodiment.
3. The ways in which voice is studied and understood are shifting away from the distinct examination of vocal production and vocal reception, and towards the area of the ‘vocal in-between’.
4. Current research enquiry turns from the voice-object and the voice-subject to voicing as process, event and multiplicity.

Στη διεθνή βιβλιογραφία και σκηνική πράξη η φωνή επανέρχεται ως πρόβλημα και ερωτηματικό. Το άρθρο εντοπίζει απόλυτες προϋποθέσεις (κατά Collingwood) που έχουν καθορίσει την αντιμετώπιση και παραστασιακή πραγμάτωση της φωνής, και αντιπροτείνει τέσσερις θέσεις για την επαναδιαπραγμάτευσή της: την απομάκρυνση από τη λογοκεντρική μεταφυσική· τη στροφή στο υλικό σώμα που παράγει τη φωνή και τις ταυτοτικές διατομές του· την επικέντρωση στην περιοχή του φωνητικού ενδιάμεσου· και την προσέγγιση της φωνής ως συμβάντος, διεργασίας και πολλαπλότητας. Η επιστημολογική τακτική του άρθρου είναι η παράλληλη συζήτηση τάσεων στις διεπιστημονικές φωνητικές σπουδές και παραδειγμάτων από μουσικές, θεατρικές και ηχητικές περφόρμανς, καθώς και συστημάτων διαπαιδαγώγησης, με στόχο την κατάδειξη της ενσώματης, υλικά απολαύσιμης, διυποκειμενικής και πολλαπλά κατασκευασμένης φωνής ως πεδίου μη τετελεσμένου αλλά πρόσφορου προς περαιτέρω διερεύνηση. Ο τρόπος γραφής είναι έμφωνος: η λίστα-μανιφέστο, πρωτοπρόσωπα παραθέματα, υπερσύνδεσμοι, άμεσες ερωτήσεις και μία playlist αξιοποιούνται ως ευκαιρίες αποκατάστασης της φωνής στον χώρο της επιστημονικής δημοσίευσης. Συνολικά, το άρθρο διαπιστώνει πως η επανεξέταση της φωνής με τους παραπάνω τρόπους διαμορφώνει ευκαιρίες ρήξεων με ό,τι έχει καθιερωθεί ως (σκηνικά ή όχι) φωνητικά αυτονόητο.

"Lessons in Queer Voice” looks into the technique of “queer speech” as a cure for stuttering in early twentieth-century speech pathology. This essay provides a brief catalog of miscellaneous queer voices from the time period, as described in singing and speech manuals, as well as in fiction. At a moment when homosexuality was undergoing medicalization, and “queer” was increasingly applied as a pejorative in the realm of sexuality, it turns out that medicine was far from internally consistent: different specialties disagreed about what made a voice queer; within a given specialty, certain impairments were preferable to others, and might even be employed therapeutically; social stigma did not always align with medical discourse.

La Ciociara: Analisi dell’espressività nella recitazione di Sophia Loren come Cesira
Priscila Haydée de Souza
Valentina Valentini
Il cinema ha un linguaggio costruito tramite l’uso tecnologico audiovisuale, con il quale l’attore si relaziona in una nuova prospettiva di recitazione. Sia l’ambientazione, l’illuminazione, i movimenti e gli angoli della machina da presa, la ripresa dei suoni, la colona sonora, i rumori, la sceneggiatura, che l’abbigliamento, il trucco, il corpo, la postura, i gesti, le espressioni faciali, la voce e la parola dell’attore compongono la mise-en-scene, veicolano informazioni e, principalmente, emozioni.
Ricco di significati, gli aspetti visivi e udibili, scelti da un gruppo di professionisti, diretto dal loro regista, cerca di costruire una narrativa, dove vengono espresse delle informazioni sul personaggio e sulla sua storia, ma pure informazioni che vanno oltre, riprendendo un contesto storico e artistico, che rispecchiano sia lo stile dell’attore-divo, del suo ruolo, del regista e del genere cinematografico.
...

El dossier "Voces y vocalidades en música popular", ha sido convocado con el propósito de enfocar las perspectivas y problemas derivados de las prácticas del canto y del uso de la voz, en la diversidad de experiencias culturales y musicales que componen el escenario presente y pasado de las músicas populares latinoamericanas. De acuerdo a la cantidad y calidad de los artículos recibidos, podemos constatar en esta entrega un amplio interés en la voz dentro de las investigaciones (etno)musicológicas actuales, reconociendo en este tema un lugar que conecta con ámbitos importantes y variados del pensamiento contemporáneo. Agradecemos por ello a los autores y las autoras que nos enviaron sus manuscritos, como también al director y el equipo editorial de Contrapulso que confiaron en nosotros para esta publicación. En el conjunto de artículos que componen este dossier, el énfasis musicológico se expresa en una matriz conceptual que se nutre fundamentalmente, por una parte, de las ideas sobre la voz del sociólogo británico Simon Frith, y por otra, de las herramientas teóricas difundidas a través de distintas aproximaciones analíticas de la popular musicology. A partir de Frith y su reconocimiento de la multiplicidad de significados que articulan la relación entre voz y texto, estos artículos abordan la voz cantada explorando el sonido y el gesto vocal, sin por ello renunciar al análisis semántico de lo que se "cuenta" cantando. Excepcionalmente se recurre a una definición de vocalidad que excede el campo musical, remitiendo a Paul Zumthor, cuyo concepto procuraba audibilizar la voz que subyace y contesta a la noción tradicional de oralidad. Poniendo el foco en la performance, la vocalidad de Zumthor permite escuchar aquello del cuerpo que interviene en la actividad vocal. Algunas de las discusiones más recientes en estudios interdisciplinarios sobre voz son convocadas en la discusión sobre música urbana, como aquéllas que Nina Sun Eidsheim y Catherine Provenzano han desarrollado en la última década en torno al timbre. Ellas dan cuenta de un interés por problematizar las perspectivas también tradicionales sobre la identidad, señalando la dimensión relacional de la voz a partir de su imbricación con la alteridad. Con todo, sobresale un modo de conceptualización de las voces cantadas que las inscribe en los territorios de géneros de la música popular en específico, a saber: música tropical, trap, reggaetón, metal y canto andino con caja; reflexionando y discutiendo las percepciones del sonido vocal que se organizan mediante cierta noción de musicalidad. Así, el trabajo sobre metal en Medellín de Juan Diego Parra, Mónica Herrera y Juan Francisco Sans, pone en cuestión la vigencia de lo melódico como eje privilegiado según el cual la voz se aprecia en tanto canto; mientras que el estudio sobre el kenko, escrito por el equipo de Paula Vilas, María Pía Latorre, Gabriela Castelli, Virginia Zangroniz y Marcelo Martínez, discute las teorizaciones previas que relegan a este sonido

and Keywords In this chapter, we discuss the dramatic narrative arc of what we call the timbre-race equilibrium, particularly how it unfolds in discourse around the career of singer Bobby Caldwell and during the blind auditions for the televised singing competition The Voice. We outline how audience confusion about Caldwell's racial identity has served as a reliable source of conversation and so-called clickbait. We also examine two instances in which The Voice employs this narrative arc, with the show's judges serving as listener-protagonists. These judges model a way of listening for the home audience, enacting what Eidsheim calls "informal listening pedagogy." In witnessing an effort to repair the rupture that occurs when race and timbre fail to align as expected, the public is entrained into normative-in this case, racialized-listening. In short, these examples model how we train ourselves, through this cyclical narrative arc, to hear timbre as racialized essence.

The Sami are the only indigenous population formally recognized in Europe, nevertheless, this significant acknowledgment cameonly in relatively recent times, after centuries of forced assimilation policies and thanks to crucial fights for self-determination and identity recognition. This article intends to offer an analysis of two cases of Sami life narratives orally transmitted as joiks, musical expressions traditionally sung a cappella and characterized by a highly descriptive value. The focus is to present, through a set of transdisciplinary approaches, intimate and social perceptions of indigeneity and the related narrative outcomes which may take place in the peculiar empathic relationship established between the narrator-performer and the audience.

On 8 December 2013, the monotonous placidity of Singapore’s streets was disrupted by antisocial violence in a district called Little India. Such acts of mass aggression were unheard of in a country whose policies of multiculturalism have been hailed
as exemplary for developed nations. This article examines the conditions and consequences of the riot in Singapore and posits that the event signified a rupture in the politics of multicultural practice. It analyses media representations, official state narratives and vitriolic public responses to consider how the voices of the rioters have been violently silenced. Framed by what Georges Bataille terms the dialectic of civilized speech versus silent violence, where silence is regarded as dispossession and objectification, and vocality as empowerment and subjectivity, this article considers the performativities of silence and violence, and the ways the riot is an event of dissensus, a politics of interruption that fractures hegemonic, state-prescribed narratives of multiculturalism.

"If I were placed on a cannibal island," the Mormon prophet Brigham Young once said, "and given the task of civilizing its people, I would straightway build a theatre for the purpose." When in 1963 the Mormon Church opened the Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC) in Oahu, Hawaii, Young's nineteenth-century pronouncement became a fact of modern Mormon identity. Today the PCC is a crown jewel of Mormonism, representing for the church a visible and successful presence outside of the intermountain region of North America. Yet while the PCC features an amusement-park-like-exhibit of Polynesian cultures, the centerpiece of the PCC is an evening musical where native performers put a uniquely Mormon vision of racial lineage center stage, thereby fulfilling Young's prophecy. In this paper, I argue that the evening musical functions as a "civilizing" tool of Mormonism to discipline the Polynesian body as a racially acceptable one. I conclude by arguing that the PCC provides Mormonism a venue for theatrically aligning Polynesians with Jews and, in turn, to Mormons themselves--all united in the performance of racial purification.

As a specific object of interest for philosophy, the human voice is grasped within a system of signification that subordinates speech to the concept. It is in the traditional dualism between the vocal/aural and the conceptual/seen that Cavarero postulates the de-vocalization of logos, the dichotomy between embodied phonation and critical enquiry. Her remarks invite further probing of the pedagogy and creative praxis of voice: how do we conceptualize voicing? How does voice emerge from and reflect back to its discursive domains? How can we bridge the chasm between the ontology and epistemology of voice? How do we think, do and disseminate voice? In reflecting on these concerns, our overall aspiration is to propose a new paradigm for practice as research (PaR) education in Voice Studies.

(A reworked and expanded version of the article appears in the 2015 book Voice Studies)

Phonodia es un archivo en línea dedicado a la voz de los poetas ideado y realizado por el autor de este libro en el marco de las actividades científicas de la Universidad Ca’ Foscari de Venecia. En Phonodia, las grabaciones de la voz de los poetas que leen sus poemas se presentan yuxtapuestos al texto poético. Este ensayo, que analiza el elemento de la «voz» en el discurso poético y las grabaciones, se enfoca en esa específica configuración donde se activa una «relación intermedial» entre medio-voz y medio-escritura. Con un enfoque interdisciplinario, el ensayo propone también un método para «escuchar críticamente» esas voces y presenta veintiocho entrevistas realizadas a los poetas españoles contemporáneos que entraron a formar parte de Phonodia y aceptaron hablar de su relación con la «voz» y cómo este elemento actúa en su práctica creativa.

In primetime U.S. political discourse, across liberal and conservative outlets alike, accusations of puppetry and ventriloquism proliferate. Despite its anachronism, the ventriloquial metaphor furnishes a reliable means of discrediting presidential candidates and president-elects by conjuring the figure of the dummy who speaks in a voice not his own. At the same time, the presidential voice’s constant mediation invites material comparisons to the channeling of voices through dummy and human bodies practiced in stage ventriloquism. This chapter examines how technologies of the voice, from microphones to speech aids such as earpieces and teleprompters, have figured into popular framings of the last three U.S. presidents as speaking puppets, arguing that bipartisan charges of ventriloquism reflect twinned national-cultural anxieties about the voice’s constitutive mediation and power’s constitutive decentralization in late capitalism. Through analyses of liberal speculations about George W. Bush’s use of listening devices, conservative claims about Barack Obama’s dependence on teleprompters, and bipartisan responses to Donald Trump’s self-presentation as a leader whose mediated voice remains perpetually unfiltered, the chapter proposes a new theory of the politics of voice that acknowledges the voice’s technicity and power’s distribution.

This article compares extractivist ideologies of voice and listening in late eighteenth-century Europe and China to envision a decolonial comparativism. Inspired by Dylan Robinson’s “apposite methodology,” the article “writes with” the French Jesuit Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot, who compared European and Chinese ears several times during his career in Beijing to ascertain why the Chinese abhorred European harmony. Through his correspondence with the Republic of Letters, Amiot’s comparisons resonated with the “sharp-eared Chinese” trope in European discourse. The dialectics of this trope, laid bare in Johann Gottfried Herder’s surprisingly similar denigrations of China and of deafness, reflected an extractivist phonocentrism by which recognition of one’s subjectivity required opening oneself up to society’s extractive listening. Hegel and post-Thermidorian French elites even posited such extraction as the foundation for pluralism and progress. Though specifically othered by European phonocentrism, the Qing Empire then ruling China articulated similar ideologies. While Amiot compared the qupai stock melodies of Kunqu theater to the vaudeville songs of opéra-comique, eighteenth-century Qing court adaptations of Kunqu departed from the pervasive use of qupai to achieve a transcendent positionality of listening. Qing-imperial ethnographies of languages and songs further revealed such transcendent listening as undergirding the multiethnic empire, where subjecthood depended on proffering a voice to the imperial ear via an extractive phonography (“voice-writing”). The article concludes by situating this phonocentrism shared between Europe and China within current academic discourses on decolonization and deimperialization. It argues that comparativism can create spaces that facilitate “turning away” from the extraction of voices, which continues to sustain imperial hegemonies as uniquely transcendent ears.

This multidisciplinary publication brings together leading scholars and practitioners, to explore what pulse phonation is, what it can do, and how it can be framed as a cultural phenomenon. This volume will draw on a broad range of approaches, from psycholinguistics and vocal training to new materialism and queer theory. By fusing critical theoretical approaches with performance, the book will consider the processes of production and perception of pulse phonation, its uses, and meanings in contemporary culture, music, theatre, and performance art, and the place it occupies in a broader reflection on voice and sound production. The book will conclude with a series of interviews and short statements from users and listeners of creaky voices.

This dissertation attempts to answer the question “Why has falsetto been systematically excluded from normative modes of western masculine vocality?” Or, in simpler terms: “Why doesn’t falsetto seem to ‘fit’ the male body?” More broadly, this project examines how the voice became an organ of identity, supposedly capable of revealing the furtive truth of a subject’s
being through vocal sound. I explore these issues through a series of case studies.
Chapter 1 examines how the discourses on singing, physiology, race, and gender all converged in late-Victorian England to produce our modern notion of vocal subjectivity. Both the sound of the voice and the structure of the vocal organs became sites where the boundaries of class, race, gender, and health were policed, and where the aesthetics of normative vocality were learned, embodied, and ultimately naturalized. Within this environment, male falsetto came to signify a wide range of “otherness,” including effeminacy, racial inferiority, and illness.
Chapter 2 explores the intersection of national musical identity, gender identity, and historically informed performance practice through an examination of the early career and reception of countertenor Alfred Deller. Deller rose to prominence singing the music of England’s past with a falsetto-dominant singing technique. I trace the audile techniques that
arose around Alfred Deller’s voice, which offered the listener strategies for attending to the claimed historicity of the countertenor voice while quelling—or at least quarantining—long ingrained anxieties regarding falsetto singing, thus maintaining the symbiotic relationship between “Englishness” and “Manliness.”
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Chapter 3 discusses how the performance artist Klaus Nomi used falsetto to create a persona founded on disjunction and artificiality, and how his unique aesthetic sensibility emerged from gay male subculture, the East Village (New York) art scene, and New Wave pop. Finally, Chapter 4 explores the representation of countertenor bodies on the operatic stage in repertoire written specifically for the voice type since 1960, especially in the operas of Benjamin Britten, Philip Glass, and John Adams.
This dissertation traces how the link between voice, body, and identity was forged, and how that negotiation plays out in the case of male falsetto. Ultimately, this project offers a critique of the way we currently think about our voices and ourselves.

In trains and nightclubs, village squares and Zoom meetings, we find vocal action (public singing and speaking, chatting and harmonizing with others, vocal uproar, protest, negotiation) that is undertaken in relation to others and unfolds over time. Yet we are also surrounded by theoretical figurations of voice that construe vocalization as _one_ (as an expression of a unified, sovereign subject) and _now_ (as immediately present, in contrast to the spatial distance and temporal delay of writing or reflection.) These theoretical abstractions are not only far removed from actual vocal life; they also foreclose vocal possibilities for contestation, rebuttal and change, locking "The Voice" into what Adriana Cavarero calls "the metaphysical box." This essay traces the philosophical construal of pristine subjective oneness and atemporal objective presence through Husserlian semiotics and the Derridean critique of the "metaphysics of presence" long associated with the voice.

It also addresses the political implications of figuring the voice as _one_ and _now_. The irrelational individual-expressivist figuration provides the metaphysical scaffolding for groupist-expressivist figurations of voice, in which homogenous collectivities are understood to speak in unison, cut off from interlocutors, response, or counter point (cut off, that is, from actual sociality.) What political and ethical possibilities might open up by turning from irrelational soliloquy to relational colloquy, among others, in time?

Voice has a long history in modern Western culture as a transparent signifier of subjectivity and presence. This ideology of immediacy has meant exploration of singing voices as mediated has mostly been confined to classic technological turns marked by specific sound devices. This article examines voice in connection with the mid-nineteenth-century soprano Jenny Lind and the broader London context of contemporary Lind mania. Mediation lends itself to canvassing questions at the crossroads of voice and celebrity studies, for the invocation of a linear, unmediated communication between particular individuals and their audiences lies at the heart of modern celebrity culture’s apparatus. The tension between voice and technē, presence and absence, evinced by printed and visual materials suggests mediation was key to the perceptual and ideological system surrounding Lind’s voice. Attending to voice within a more porous, relational framework can help us move away from a concern with individuality and authenticity, and listen to a rich tapestry of human and material encounters.

Un poeta che legge ad alta voce un proprio componimento, lo rievoca rimodulandone nell’esecuzione aspetti costitutivi del linguaggio poetico come l’enjambement e la cesura. La voce fisica, agendo nella frattura tra sintassi e prosodia e rendendo evidenti le variazioni tra testo pubblicato e versione ex vocis, rimette in circolo in uno spazio e in un tempo determinati e in maniera sempre diversa ciò che quel testo può evocare nel soggetto in ascolto. La poesia, da sempre legata alla voce fisica, al canto e al corpo, è quel linguaggio che mostra meglio queste variazioni e relazioni. Inoltre, nella rievocazione del proprio testo, il poeta si mostra come soggettività unica – nonché egli stesso in ascolto – aprendo uno spazio sempre nuovo per l’incontro con il lettore-ascoltatore – e con il critico-ascoltatore.

This article examines community stewardship of khöömei, kargyraa, and sygyt (all commonly called “throat-singing”) and musical pilgrimage to the Khöömei Ovaa (cairn) from 2011 to 2018 in the Tyva Republic, part of the Russian Federation. More generally, this article traces the revitalization of land-based gift exchanges in Altai and Sayan Mountain ecologies of Inner Asia through mutual entanglements of land, kin, and life energy (khei-a’t). Following my teachers, I suggest a horse herder’s tethering post (baglaash) as a model for musical stewardship in Tyva and discuss the obligations expected of guests and hosts in musical gift exchanges. I foreground envoicement (ünneshtirer) and attunement (khöönnei) as central aspects of the khöömeizhi’s sonic-musical craft and explore the responsibilities entailed in using and sharing melodies for particular purposes. In so doing, I offer a reparative approach to reconciling disjunctures in historic consciousness and traumatic heritage across shared homelands in postsocialist Inner Asia and beyond.

My recent research has investigated work by specific women sound artists and some of the ways in which they were using voice to challenge historical and contemporary cultural assumptions about women’s voices and the male normative in sound arts practice. This research  develops this research to look into some of the ways in which women are made alien or animal through the reception of their material voices and then to discuss how women artists  have embraced and subverted this alien status through  performative spoken word.  Frames of reference include Carol Adams work on the sexual politics of meat; the use of women’s voices in sci – fi films and sonic cyberfeminism.

Although the plot of the one-act chamber opera Zora D.  is set in the Belgrade of the 1930’s, the  subject  of  Isidora  Žebeljan’s  work  are  not  the  dominant  ideologies  in  Serbia  at  the  time.  The context  of  the  Serbian  musical  and  theatrical  scene  with  which  this  opera  “networked’  concerns Serbian post-socialist society in transition, at the end of the 20 th  and beginning of the 21
st  century, in which culture was to a great extent subordinated to the favoured phantasm of tradition. That phantasm is  most  explicitly  projected  to  those  institutions  of  society  that  support  it  the  strongest  –  the  church
and the  army.  However,  political  shifts towards  the  ideals  of  traditional  and national values  led  to  a forming of artistic production that may, in terms of many of its features, be regarded in analogy with  the thriving of romanticism and ideals that were defended by it in the 19th  century. Often composers
turn  to  the  musically  national  in  a  manner  resembling  the  fascination  of  Romantic  composers  of  national  schools  with  folkloric  heritage.

Smart home device Amazon Echo, equipped with a voice assistant named Alexa, is a new ear within the home, gathering previously inaccessible sounds of the domestic sphere. Devices such as Echo are constantly 'on' and listening, but whether Echo is always recording is subject to speculation and ambiguity. In this article, I use Echo to theorise sonic surveillance through what I term the 'neoliberal ear'a twenty-first century mode of listening to the world embedded into 'surveillance capitalism.' (Zuboff 2019) I examine the relationship between non-creative recording practices and voice-enabled technology within the context of neoliberalism and its legislative allowances. Conceptualizing Amazon Echo as a complex sonic object that listens to voices in the domestic space in order to gather information on the subjectivity of its users while normalizing the ubiquity of listening in, I investigate the surveillance capabilities of the device, and conduct a sound studies analysis of dispossession and displacement in surveillance capitalism, which I argue are rooted in the split between listening and recording in US copyright law. To discuss Echo's legal ground, I focus on a murder case in which Echo was requested as evidence, considering the specificity of sound within privacy law, and analysing the relationship between Echo and the First and Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. I view these sonic theorisations of the US legal framework as an initial step to form a neoliberal history of aurality through the conception of the neoliberal ear.