Postmodern Culture - Special Issue - Voice Matters

2019

More than two hundred years after the first speaking machine, we are accustomed to voices talking from seemingly any- and everywhere. We interact daily with voices emitting from house alarm systems, cars, telephones, and digital assistants, or “smart speakers,” such as Alexa and Google Home. However, vocal events still have the capacity to raise age-old questions regarding the human, the animal, the machine, and the spiritual—or in non-metaphysical terms—questions about identity and authenticity. Moreover, individuals and groups perform, refuse, and play identity through vocal acts and by listening to and for voice. In this volume, leading scholars from multiple disciplines respond to the seemingly innocuous question: What is voice? While also emphasizing connections and overlaps, the chapters show that the definition and ways of studying of voice is ever so diverse. In fact, many of the authors have worked on connecting voice research across disciplines. We seek to cultivate this trend and to affirm the development of voice studies as a transdisciplinary field of inquiry. It includes diverse standpoints at the intersections of science, culture, technology, arts, and the humanities. While questions of voice address crucial issues within the humanities—for example, the relationships between voice, speech, listening, writing, and meaning—we also seek close interaction with the social sciences and medicine in our search for a more complete understanding of these relationships. We use the term voice studies in this context as a specific intervention, to offer a moniker that gathers together otherwise disparate intellectual perspectives and methods and thus hope to facilitate further transdisciplinary conversation and collaboration.

Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, 2021

Master of Voice" is a temporary program of Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) that united artists of different backgrounds who shared voice-based practices. Often considered as a medium in art history, the (non)human voice has been identified as a discipline in its own right. The book Master of Voice (Smits, 2020) presents the artworks and reflections arisen during a two-yearlong period of research based on collective learning and experimentation. The human voice is mainly approached through gender and technology, gushing from a multiplicity of bodies, freed from Western social norms. Editor Lisette Smits shares a vivid reflection about the role of contemporary artists and the range of their voices in our post-industrial society. The book emphasizes the agency of the voice and accordingly, its potential as a political and social tool.

Quarterly Journal of Speech

2021

Master of Voice" is a temporary program of Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) that united artists of different backgrounds who shared voice-based practices. Often considered as a medium in art history, the (non)human voice has been identified as a discipline in its own right. The book Master of Voice (Smits, 2020) presents the artworks and reflections arisen during a two-yearlong period of research based on collective learning and experimentation. The human voice is mainly approached through gender and technology, gushing from a multiplicity of bodies, freed from Western social norms. Editor Lisette Smits shares a vivid reflection about the role of contemporary artists and the range of their voices in our post-industrial society. The book emphasizes the agency of the voice and accordingly, its potential as a political and social tool.

A colloquy in the Journal of the American Musicological Society on voice studies. My contribution sketches out a model for thinking about the voice and encourages ways of developing voice studies beyond (what I call) the "Derridean impasse." The colloquy was convened by Martha Feldman, and the other contributors were Emily Wilbourne, Steve Rings, and James Q. Davies.

Music and Politics, 2016

twentieth century music, 2016

Special Issue on Voice

PARSE journal n. 13 (2), 2021

The title of this article carries an inherent contradiction. How could something so elusive, and most of all, invisible, as the voice, be exhibited? Despite the availability of recording technologies for over a century, the voice still conveys the impossibility of being caught in place and time. It was this contradiction that the exhibition Post-Opera (TENT, V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, Operadagen Rotterdam, 2019) worked with, in order to show the affect of the singing voice, the bodies they emit it, and challenge the socio-cultural frame that influence the perception of who can have a voice and what is considered a voice. In the Western world, the notion of "having a voice" is commonly associated with the right to have a vote, to have a voice in society, often expressed in individualised and humanistic terms. Critics of humanism, and in particular critical posthumanists, have already pointed out the non-neutrality and inherent privileges the term carries, with its underlying connection to white, patriarchal, anthropocentric and colonial meanings. Instead of this rather Eurocentric conception of the voice, Post-Opera demonstrated a disconnect between this view and brought forth a proposition where singing machines, mechanisms, beasts, animals and other "others" joined in a collective form of vocal expression. They sung beyond opera and at the same time beyond human. This way Post-Opera proposed a different ontological understanding of voices and their potentialities, as well as the variety of ways voices are let to be heard.This text reflects on the ways in which the exhibition and surrounding programme materialised on the intersections of visual art and postdramatic opera, while confronting voice studies and theories of critical posthumanism in order to posit the voice beyond its humanist license.

ustralasian Journal of Popular Culture, 2(2)., 2013

Creative production is increasingly dependent on, and almost inseparable from, digital technologies. At the same time, the landscapes of our everyday lives are defined by our relationships to digital and networked cultures more than ever before. VØ1CE: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, edited by Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson and Theo Van Leeuwen, is a collection of essays dedicated to the mediated voice in digital cultures -both the artistic and the quotidian. This book will appeal to readers with an interest in the many ways that the voice has been shaped by new technologies and concomitantly, how the voice, language and vocalization have also contributed to the shape of digital cultures. Featuring nineteen chapters authored by a multidisciplinary array of scholars and creative practitioners, VØ1CE offers a comprehensive overview of digital technologies and the human/posthuman and embodied/disembodied voice. Divided into four main sections -'Capturing VOICE'; 'Performing VOICE'; 'Reanimating VOICE'; and 'At the Human Limits of VOICE' -this anthology brings together critical perspectives from fields such as philosophy, history, anthropology, musicology, psychology, media and communications, film studies and gaming studies, among others.

Oxford Art Journal 43, no. 2, 2020

In recent years, the rallying cry to 'decolonise art history' has become a mainstay of critical debates in the academy, public institutions, and on social media; calling attention to the need to acknowledge unspoken biases rooted in the legacies of imperialism, interrogate the discipline's exclusionary mechanisms of power, and to give voice to previously marginalised or even silenced subjectivities-to finally hear 'the subaltern speak' and for such speech to transform our existing apparatuses of knowledge production and dissemination. 1 Although these issues have been articulated by scholars, artists, and curators (usually hailing from the 'Global South') for decades, the strident vocalisation and amplification of these concerns at this present moment is telling. The ongoing saga of the UK Brexit referendum, the Trump administration, fears of mass migration and cross-border movements, and most recently, the Covid-19 global pandemic, has fomented a chorus of xenophobic, nationalistic, and jingoistic invectives that have dominated public discourses across the world. Yet, the coterminous proliferation of grassroots movements like #MeToo, #IamNotaVirus, #BlackLivesMatter and #ICantBreathe have emphasized the urgent need to call out systemic forms of discrimination and social injustice, and to speak out against the myriad, pervasive, and suffocating forms of racial, sexual, gendered, and environmental violence that have gone unseen and unheard for much too long. In this clamour of often violently opposing perspectives, art historical or otherwise, it is striking how questions of identity, representation, and power accrete in the metaphor of voice. Given the ocular-centricity of the field, it is not surprising that considerations of visibility and opacity-the disciplinary operations of the gaze and its refusal-have dominated efforts towards decentring and decolonizing the scope of art historical inquiry thus far. However, there remains much to be said about the critical potential of 'sound's invisible formlessness' to disrupt the 'surface of the visible world.' 2 While visuality, as numerous critics have noted, is generally directed, focused and linear, sound is immersive and multi-directional. 3 We might be able look away or askance from the gaze, return it, or even turn a 'blind eye' to its operations of power, but sound is altogether more diffuse and intersubjective-passing through seemingly impenetrable boundaries and barriers; reverberating across space and time. Yet, of all the sounds in the world, it is only the voice that remains so intimately bound to questions of agency, subjectivity, and authority. Voice as Form parses the interpretative registers through which we can better theorise the agentic and material dimensions of voice in artistic practice. The artists whose work is discussed and presented in this special issue speak from contexts of exclusionary identitarian structures, the intimate experiences of migration and diaspora, and challenge the pervasive logic of coloniality that still shapes our contemporary postcolonial and postnational moment. But to confine our understandings of these works to forms of communication alone only reinforces the reduction of voice to metaphor, a potentially disempowering