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Monday, December 17, 2018

Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies 3.2 is now available

Intellect is delighted to announce that the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies 3.2 is now available! For more information about the issue, click here >> https://bit.ly/2UUkFaD

Special Issue: Voice, identity, contact

Content

Voice, identity, contact
Authors: Yvon Bonenfant 

‘Doing fifty-five in a fifty-four’: Hip hop, cop voice and the cadence of white supremacy in the United States
Authors: Jennifer Lynn Stoever 

This article examines how police officers in the United States use a racialized and gendered way of speaking called ‘cop voice’ to provoke fear and extreme forms of compliance from people of colour. Through autoethnographic analysis coupled with sonic attention to how Jay-Z (‘99 Problems’), Public Enemy (‘Get the Fuck Out of Dodge’) and Prince Paul (‘The Men in Blue’) represent ‘cop voice’ through shifts in their rapping flow or by using white guest rappers, ‘Doing 55 in a 54’ argues that police weaponize their voices. Identifying and listening closely to these examples of cop voice reveal how people who are raced as ‘white’ in the United States mobilize this subject position in their voices through particular cadences that audibly signify racial authority, while at the same time, never hearing themselves as doing so.

‘Now she wanna lick my plum’: Azealia Banks and the undoing of antiblackness
Authors: Justin Adams Burton 

In the first verse of Azealia Banks’s 2011 ‘212’, the singer tells us of a ‘she’ who wants to lick her ‘plum’. Banks commits to the encounter, announcing, ‘I guess that cunt gettin eaten’, then chanting the line over and over. After a few iterations, though, a filter sweep slowly swallows her voice, leaving the listener to fill in the rest of the chant’s vocals. Here, I consider this moment as a sonic ‘undoing’ of Banks’s vocals that results in her voice crossing over into listeners’ bodies. I contextualize this sonic undoing in terms of Karen Barad’s theory of ‘agential cuts’, which separate otherwise entangled matter, then filter this through Sylvia Wynter’s work on rebellion, which she defines as an undoing of the negation of ‘Black peoples in slave and postslave eras’. Listening alongside Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, I argue that Banks’s sonic undoing is also a rebellious performance of queer Black affirmation.

Your voice is hair: Speculations toward a metaphor for styling vocal identity

Authors: Yvon Bonenfant 

This article explores the styling of vocal identity through blending together descriptions, assertions, and theorizations that result from an artistic, or arts-practice-led, research process. It asserts that hair-styling can be used as an interesting and potent metaphor for inviting audiences to more consciously experience the styling act of shaping their vocal emanations. With reference to the installation Curious Replicas, which invites audiences in to play with vocal soundings by opening up possibilities for voice-change, the author suggests that with each utterance, each of us emits a temporally travelling cloud of auditory, tactile and visual data that he calls a multisensory vocal identity projection (MVIP), a concept which he builds from assertions in Kreiman’s and Sidtis’ (2011) extended study of studies. The installation tries to give public audiences agency over how their MVIPs are generated and then celebrated as aestheticized products, while troubling aspects of how these projections function, and conjoining them to an experience of intersensory inundation, that includes sound, touch and vision. The writing makes a range of claims that link voice production, interactive art use, and corporeal self-styling, and touches on models for understanding user behaviour derived from fashion studies. The article is more concerned with the concepts it troubles, than with drawing clear conclusions, and as such, situates itself within what artistic discourse does best: it speculates.

The signification of the signed voice
Authors: Alexis Deighton MacIntyre 

Embodiment is central to voice studies, but describing vocality as a material figure requires that the embodied voice be defined, implicitly and/or in stark terms. Consequently, apparently self-evident loci of the voice emerge as the throat, mouth, tongue, and ear, yet these physical sites reveal a narrow view of voicing. In particular, Deafness and sign language hold a tenuous position at the fringe of voice studies, to be evaded or invoked only as a special case. Examining voice as it is conceived of by Deaf people and academics, hearing culture, and voice studies, as well as cognitive neuroscience, I argue that the forces excluding Deaf voice and language rely on truisms from western metaphysics. Rooted in the mind-body divide, these assumptions regard gesture and movement as primitive or beast-like. In discourse surrounding the voice, they are manifest in terminology that privileges tone, timbre, pitch, and high-frequency material vibration. This embodied turn is driven by latent beliefs surrounding sound and its associated anatomy, resulting therefore in the omission not only of sign language, but of gesture and other nonverbal vocal actions. Intrinsically linked with the body, rhythm encounters a similar fate. In critique of sound quality and the division of senses, I draw together Deaf insights with neurobiological investigations of multimodality, action perception, and rhythm cognition, and submit that temporal and action-based frameworks offer an alternative means by which to source the vocal body, one that fluidly accommodates hearing voices, Deaf voices, and the movements they share in common.

Diverging voices together: An interview with Sara Clethero
Authors: Yvon Bonenfant And Sara Clethero 

This interview explores the experience of artistic director and music facilitator Sara Clethero within her engagement with voicings by persons with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). For 25 years, alongside the integrated singing practice of her teaching ensemble OperaMint she has facilitated singing groups for service users with ASD in residential contexts. Together, we explore the ways she feels that the kinds of singing practices she discovers alongside the service users are both unique and yet capable of engaging with musicality on similar terms to neuro-typical singers. We reflect on the particular qualities of this vocal ensemble and its social and vocalic implications.

From-ness: The identity of the practitioner in the laboratory
Authors: Nazlıhan Eda Erçin 

This voicing is a self-reflexive response to the following questions which I often find myself pondering: Where is identity located within an intercultural laboratory of performance research? How does one circumnavigate the stereotype in encounters with culturally familiar material? As a performer/researcher of auto-ethnographic performance with a training practice in psycho-physical theatre, I find myself being challenged by specific source materials such as songs, images or texts which are associated with specific identity categories. This piece traces that challenge across my work by meditating on songs as identity-associated multisensory cultural material. One particular song, ‘Şişeler’, which I extensively worked with in the context of Judaica Project, leads my discussion.