Colloquy: Why Voice Now?

Music and Politics, 2016

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.

2019

To play an instrument in a way that is considered vocal has been an emblem of artistry for instrumental musicians in the Western classical tradition for centuries. Despite the ubiquity of vocal references in the talk and texts produced within this community, there is little consensus as to what vocality means for instrumental musicians, and few questions are asked of those who claim to advocate for a vocal style of playing. Whilst vocality for instrumentalists has been dealt with in existing scholarship through discussion about the emulation of specific techniques such as vibrato and portamento, by investigating the principles of rhetoric and their relationship to temporal and articulatory issues, and in philosophical commentary on vocality as an ideal to which instrumentalists aspire, attention has not yet been paid to how voice is produced and manipulated discursively by instrumental musicians in the social contexts of their professional lives. Therefore, this thesis explores some...

2021

This combination of four pieces reflects an overarching theme of researching the ways that our foundations and experiences shape us, either by our own hands or by the hands of others. This is a final portfolio that was submitted to the English Department of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the field of English

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.

Review of 'Cathy Berberian Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality' by Nina Sun Eidsheim,

Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2015

Voice is the unique sound of the human self, made audible. The sound of the voice is contingent upon the complex structure of each individual human body for the nature and quality of the sound emanating from it, as well as being subject to the state of health of the individual, both mental and physical, which contributes to the constantly, if subtly varying physicality of the individual. It is indeed a truism that the voice is unique, inasmuch as no two humans are identical, and therefore no two voices are identical. I propose a phenomenological discussion of the performing voice, in order to reveal the voice in its material and substantial thingliness as the sound of the unique individual who is the actor, containing within its fluctuations and its nuances the character who emerges from the actor’s engagement with the text. There are at least three inter-connected challenges disrupting perception of the uniqueness of the voice and defying attempts at its representation. The first challenge arises out of the constraints of a culture that has traditionally valued the written word as the means of interpretation and analysis of performance. This privileging of the written word both informs, and is informed by the second challenge, which is the commonly held notion of the voice as a mere carrier of text, whereby the voice itself is assumed to be “synonymous with speech” (Titze xviii). Such a misconception regarding the difference between voice and speech is bound up with the third challenge, which is the nature of perception itself and how it is generally discussed.

Comparative Literature Studies, 2024

The musical orality of the lyric voice constitutes one of the most formidable and persistent facets of the ideology of German Romanticism, one that is further bequeathed to the arts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking the musicality of the voice and the ineffability of “absolute” music as its point of departure, this essay investigates a series of primarily German-Jewish figures—Kafka, Schoenberg, Straub-Huillet, and Celan—who stage a radical confrontation with the political aestheticization of the voice. Premonitions and reverberations of these figures’ vocal “destruction” are further traced in Adorno, Kraus, and Maimonides. At stake is not only a comparative study of the voice at the intersection of various media (music, literature, opera, film, and public performance) but also the kind of majoritarian–minoritarian dynamics (between Yiddish and German, German and Hebrew) that arise internal to a single language and its linguistic politics. German-Jewish cultural poetics ultimately develops as a response to the tensions between nation and empire emergent in the dappled political landscape of Central and Eastern Europe—and amends the dominant Romantic paradigm accordingly.