DAY 2
WEDNESDAY, 7th SEPTEMBER 2022
09:30-11:00
Paper Session 4 — Folklore, Diaspora, Belonging
Voice, migration, and the politics of place
Juliana M. Pistorius, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow, University College London and the University of the Witwatersrand
In South African artist William Kentridge’s 2016 installation, Triumphs and Laments, a processional band of musicians, dancers, and singers, perform narratives of displacement on the travertine banks of Rome’s Tiber River. Their laboured trek, accompanied by a hybrid score of religious and folk music from Southern Italy and Southern Africa, serves as an allegory for what Homi Bhabha (2016) calls ‘the biopolitics of foot power’—the endless, burdened march of the globe’s marginalised and dispossessed. Simultaneously, however, the performers’ embodied vocality suggests a form of sonic agency at odds with their drifting and dispossessed subjectivity. Disenfranchised and displaced, the processional figures of Triumphs and Laments sound out a vocal presence that contradicts their migrant state of homelessness. Instead, they perform a mode of belonging evocative of the place of origin, rather than arrival. They are both alienated and present, voiceless and envoiced.
Existing theories of vocal agency invoke tropes of interaction, exchange, and mutuality to attribute floating authority to sonic expression: perpetually on the move, voice seems to transcend the hierarchical organisation of physical geographies (Dolar 2006; Cavarero 2005). Within this frame, the disenfranchised voice, sonically powerful, yet perpetually disempowered, represents a dilemma. This paper argues for a recalibration of existing theories of vocal agency to account for the physical places in which voices sound. Situating the contradiction of the sounding-yet-silent voice of the migrating subject in a conception of voice culture as inescapably placed, I argue that the locatedness of voice profoundly affects constructions and realisations of agency. In conclusion, I propose that the politics of the migrant voice is simultaneously produced by and productive of the unequal geographies within which it sounds.
Juliana M. Pistorius is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London, and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her research centres around Western art music in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, and incorporates interests in voice, race, coloniality, and political resistance. As a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield (2018-2021), she completed a project on postcoloniality, cultural representation, and the politics of form in South African artist William Kentridge’s operatic projects. The resulting monograph, Postcolonial Opera: William Kentridge and the Unbounded Work of Art, is in progress. She is a founding member of the Black Opera Research Network and reviews editor for Cambridge Opera Journal.
Over-, Mis- and Under-Heard: Voice(s) of Oriental Jane Doe in FERVĒRE
Una Lee, PhD, Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
‘FERVĒRE’ is a research-led artistic project and bi-lingual body of work consisting of multi-format pieces. In this project, I engage with the practice of homophonic translation as a means of excavating ‘over-, mis- and under-heard voice’, and address the particular entanglement of racism and sexism on Asian female body with references to such real-life incidents as Atlanta Spa Shooting and murder of Korean-American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. I narrativise and use the process of wild fermentation as a metaphor for survival of trauma, but also for (negative) intercultural assimilation. I will introduce, illustrate and share sounds/scenes/texts from ‘FERVĒRE’ and explore the ideas embedded in it. I will also present the sound work ‘Down Gone’ from the project in the evening event.
Una Lee works with sounds, stories and sensations, in perpetual pursuit of alternative storytelling. She seeks innovation in the contemporary marriage between performance and poetry, exploring human condition, memory, time, and our relationship with art and ecology, often drawing from her autobiographical events and her present identity as non-native in her habitat. She is a recipient of The Oram Awards 2020, and has performed and exhibited across the Northern hemisphere. She is a member of experimental group ‘HIVE Choir’, part of the duo ‘OULAN’, and co-director of the micro-label ‘quills that whisper’. She holds MA and PhD in Sonic arts from Queen’s University Belfast, at which she currently serves as Visiting Scholar.
Young music, old voice: authentic folklore records in contemporary Lithuanian electronic music
Eglė Gelažiūtė-Pranevičienė, PhD candidate, Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore
Traditional folklore in contemporary popular music throughout the globe is being used in various ways and styles from meditative chillout music to world music, to ethnic trance. The contemporary form here works as a way for traditional culture to be alive and continue to be practiced. The folkloric part is mostly constituted by traditional songs performed by contemporary singers who are usually young to middle-aged. However, more and more examples appear where an authentic record of an old person singing the native traditional song becomes the core of a contemporary music piece. How does a music creator use and change the authentic material? How does the authentic record change the contemporary music? How does the listener perceive the old voice, and what is the message there? These are the main questions that will be discussed through musicological and phenomenological methodologies. A case study of Lithuanian contemporary folklore music will be given as an example.
Eglė Gelažiūtė-Pranevičienė is a Ph.D. student and a music artist working in the fields of ethnomusicology and phenomenological anthropology. For eight years she was a vocal teacher and an independent voice researcher, working on different singing techniques and therapeutical aspects of singing. She did her master‘s on traditional singing as a possible way to know and train one‘s voice and prepared an album of prototypical singing exercises ("Grynojo balso link”, 2017, Tamsaule). Now she focuses on the live continuity of traditional Lithuanian culture in various contemporary musical forms, assessing not only the musical but also experiential shifts.
CHAIR Bennett Hogg
11:00-11:15
Short break with
‘A chorus of geo-haptic tones’
Felicia Konrad, Independent Artist, Malmö, Sweden
Dr Julieanna Preston, Professor of Spatial Practice, Massey University, New Zealand
A chorus of geo-haptic tones: It is common knowledge that sound waves travel through the environment and atmosphere as energy that vibrates the molecules of solid, liquid, or gaseous material. Their acoustic behaviour is a reflective, absorptive, or transmissive response to any surface with which they come in contact. Temperature, wind speed, humidity, topography, season, currents, tides, and solar and lunar cycles propagate sound waves in global and local landscapes. A voice launched is a sound that touches the world. What happens when the world touches back? This is a vocal performance between two friends, two women, two lands, two continents on opposite sides of the earth. Two voices migrate back and forth in an improvisational, vibrating circuitry navigating through thick, loose, dense, light, smooth, turbid, calm, fierce and fickle geography, each refrain gaining and loosing bits of the landscape it has touched as it unfurls and unfolds. Adjustments and inflections retune the voice as it makes its way from here to there, now to then, her to her, again and again—a refrain of geo-haptic tones. Not as simple as calling out to send a message, it is a volley, a round, a processual chorus transformed by a process of repeated exchanges keeping voice alive, fluid and connected to the body and world. A voice projected, unleashed, and roaming wild, sheds its habit to be proper song, harmonious and melodic sound, and voice disciplined as a mouthpiece of spoken language, text, words, and chatter. Travelling through a global geography, this voice regains its suppressed rawness, its relation to the gut and bodily orifices—a process of reclaiming voice as it might have been before its castration from sensations, emotions, and subjectivities, perhaps before the voice was colonised as a cognitive word-based communication instrument.
Felicia Konrad is a multidisciplinary artist (voice/sound art/performance/music/text/film) living in Malmö, Sweden. Her solo works are mostly minimalistic, playful, poetic, humorous small-scale pieces; as a cultural project leader artivist/climate activist, she is involved with collaborative, interactive, collectives. Recent works include an intuitive art project I Still Live in Water, an on-going collaborative sound piece (Konrad/Carlsson/Persson/Quartey) entitled Breathing Water, and an upcoming 2022 voice/sound/performance work called The Oracle. www.feliciakonrad.se/ www.istillliveinwater.com/ www.breathingwater.se
Julieanna Preston is an artist and spatial designer whose creative practice has found a home in durational, site situated, sonic art, vocalisation and body movement works. Her performances, videos, installations, and scholarship extend attributes, qualities, and agency to worldly materials, places, pages and written and spoken words in search of a spectrum of intimate and animate modalities. Julieanna is a postgraduate supervisor for creative practice research projects at Massey University.
11:15-12:45
Paper Session 5 – Body
“Where things lost become…”—Ventriloquism and paradoxical nostalgia in the bio-musical
Dr Ben Macpherson, Reader in Vocal Theatres, University of Portsmouth UK
Drawing on core tenets of Steven Connor’s seminal work Dumbstruck (2000), this 20-minute paper uses ideas from ventriloquism to articulate four possible ways in which acts of vocal simulation/imitation in popular bio-musicals may foster a paradoxical sense of nostalgia for listeners’ and audience members. Considering recent live stage musical iterations of Tina Turner (by Adrienne Warren) and Donna Summer (by various artists) in the West End and on Broadway, I explore the ways in which these voices might be understood through notions of twinning, ghosting, polyphony, and mutilation.
In each case, the ventriloquial qualities of the performance will be discussed with reference to Svetlana Boym’s two interlaced tendencies of nostalgia (2001), to discover how these voices may be all at once a remembrance (Boym’s reflective nostalgia) and an act of creation (restorative nostalgia). The process of negotiating visceral immediacy and cultural memory (both individual and collective) catalysed by twinned, ghosted, polyphonic or mutilated voices serves to destabilise the pastness of these ‘retro’ musical productions, prompting us to re-evaluate their value in popular culture at large, and expanding ways of considering the relationship between live performance, nostalgia, memory, and the possibilities inherent in such vicarious vocalities.
Ben Macpherson is Reader in Vocal Theatres at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Along with his work as Course Leader for the BA (Hons) Musical Theatre programme and practice as a composer-lyricist on projects such as the 2020 site-specific audio-walk ‘Virginia Dare and the Lost Colony’ (commissioned by the UK’s national Being Human Festival), he is founding co-editor of the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (Intellect, since 2015) and the Routledge Voice Studies book series. Along with Konstantinos Thomaidis, he co-edited the pioneering volume Voice Studies: Critical Approaches to Process, Performance and Experience (Routledge, 2015), while his first monograph – Cultural Identity in British Musical Theatre, 1890-1939: Knowing One’s Place – was published by Palgrave in 2018. He is the founding convenor of the Vicarious Vocalities, Simulated Songs network, and is currently principal investigator for the Original Cast Recordings: Musical Theatre and/as Sonic Heritage research network, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. His current book project, Singing Utopia – Voice in Musical Theatre is under contract with Oxford University Press.
Dis/embodiment: the Female Soprano Voice in Oxbridge Chapel Choirs
Jessica Edgar, DPhil, Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, UK
The female soprano voice is greatly affected by the presence of boy trebles in Oxbridge chapel choirs, producing a sound which is subconsciously idealized, but incompatible with the developing female vocal mechanism. Female sopranos were incorporated into this 600-year-old tradition only in the last 30 years, creating a change in the sound of this static, timeless genre. However, Timothy Day argues that the accepted sound of boy trebles was only cultivated in the early 20th century with widespread recordings. Therefore, the relationship between this accepted “timeless” British choral sound and the addition of women to the top line creates a complex relationship between the idealized and institutionalized sound and healthy vocal technique. These 18–21-year-old female sopranos must navigate their developing voices between the embodied “solo” technique they learn in voice lessons and the disembodied “choral” technique subconsciously generated in ensemble environments. The aim of this study is to illuminate the physical and symbolic nuances present for female soprano voices in this historically male tradition and to analyze the relationship between a historical style of music and the people/institutions who create it at present. The evolution of the soprano line in Oxbridge Chapel Choirs has created a significantly different sound with the repertoire which has remained largely unchanged. This study gives voice to the “interlopers” in the Oxbridge choral tradition, illuminating physical discomfort and sedimented gender inequalities, and creating not only vocal tension but also a symbolic tension between the concepts of the female body, institutionalization, timelessness, sound and voice.
Jessica Edgar is a DPhil candidate in the music faculty at the University of Oxford and she received her BA in both music and psychology from Columbia University. Jessica’s research consists of bridging voice studies with a focus on ensemble singing with the hearing sciences, vocal health and audiological practices. She has been published in the anniversary edition of the Kapralova Society’s Journal of Women in Music and has had presentations at conferences including the Voice Foundation’s Annual Symposium, the Conference for Interdisciplinary Musicology at the University of Edinburgh, and the Birmingham Conservatoire’s Music Since 1900 conference, among others. She has worked in auditory neuroscience and psychology laboratories at Columbia University, the Zuckerman Institute and Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Jessica is also a professional soprano around Oxford and London. She has worked with artists such as the Academy of Ancient Music, Michael Chance, the Instruments of Time and Truth, Mary Bevan, Edward Higginbottom, and Andrea Bocelli and has sung at venues such as Westminster Abbey, Madison Square Garden, Trinity Wall Street and the Olympic stadium in Beijing.
Listening as disidentifying: the voice-body problem in Joan La Barbara’s vocal practice
Malte Kobel, PhD, Independent Scholar, Berlin
In this paper, I will listen to Joan La Barbara’s extended vocal technique in order to problematise the relationship between the voice and its producing body. The voice and its body have had a contested relationship in voice scholarship: it has been variously theorised as grain (Barthes), index (Van Elferen) or as an “intermaterial vibration” (Eidsheim). Even though the voice evades capture (Koestenbaum, Feldman), it seems as if the body was a stable exception to the voice’s elusiveness. It is after all the voice as a body which we hear when we listen to a singer sing. Listening then is crucial to theorising the voice’s relationship to its body. As acousmatic theories have shown, such a listening to the voice is identificatory (Kane, Chion, Eidsheim). In listening, a listener identifies a sound source and thus fixes a body in and to a voice. Joan La Barbara’s extended vocal techniques trouble such a monocausal identification (Chion). Vocal techniques such as overtone singing, ululation or glottal clicks, for instance, all engage different parts of the body. La Barbara’s practice presents listeners with a multiplicity of bodies and maintains that there is not one physiological entity that is called ‘voice’ (Vágnerová). By way of listening to La Barbara’s many voices, I aim to outline a specific disidentifying listening to the musicking voice. Where an identificatory listening can only ever reproduce a monocausal relationship between the voice and its body, listening as disidentifying affords a conceptualisation of the manifold bodily performances that are at work in La Barbara’s practic
Malte Kobel has recently been awarded his PhD in Music at Kingston University London. His dissertation with the title “The musicking voice: performance, affect and listening” develops a theory of the voice as a musicking entity and offers a musico-epistemological problem to philosophies of voice and music. Prior to Kingston, Malte has studied musicology at the University of Vienna and at Humboldt University of Berlin. His work has been published in the Journal for Cultural Research and Sound Studies. Apart from academic work he teaches, co-runs the record label Hyperdelia, curates radio programmes and is initiator of the collective BLATT 3000.
CHAIR: Yvon Bonenfont
12:45-13:30
LUNCH BREAK
with
‘A chorus of geo-haptic tones’
by Felicia Konrad and Julieanna Preston
13:30-15:00
Paper Session 6– Computer / AI / Posthuman
Remediating Auto-Tune: Caroline Polachek’s Machine-Imitative Vocality
Amy Skjerseth, Lecturer in Audiovisual Media and Co-Director of MA Music in Audiovisual Media Program, University of Liverpool, UK
Since 1997, Auto-Tune, a software plug-in for pitch correction, has cast doubt on pop stars’ authenticity because they no longer need to sing in tune. Producers apply Auto-Tune to countless pop voices today, creating an industry-wide digitally polished sound. From Cher on, however, a range of artists have creatively “misused” (Provenzano 2019) Auto-Tune by setting the software’s retuning speed to instant pitch correction that produces machinic, garbled tones. Instead of a behind-the-scenes Photoshop for the voice, the creative misuse of Auto-Tune—known as “the Auto-Tune effect”—is read by critics as unnatural, even inhuman. This paper examines how the Auto-Tune effect not only inspires robotic voices, but also allows singers to adopt new, various, and often pliable personas—even without using the software.
I take US singer Caroline Polachek as a case study for examining just how far and wide the Auto-Tune effect has traveled in over two decades—from a sound that requires software to one imitated by humans. Polachek, once the ethereal synth-pop voice of Chairlift and now solo artist, can modulate her voice to sound like Auto-Tune without its typical material constraints. While she snaps between notes seemingly effortlessly, Polachek’s elaborate practice and warm-up routines keep her voice limber for ultra-melismatic runs. Her vocal remediations of Auto-Tune can be teased out through Freya Jarman’s notions of internal (biotechnological) and external (“man-made”) vocal technologies (2011), alongside the imagery seen in the music video for “Bunny is a Rider” (Caroline Polachek and Matt Copson, 2021). I read the video, where Polachek runs through a Minotaur-like maze, as a metaphor for her efforts to evade the pop industry’s negative labels of voice modulation. By emulating Auto-Tune with her own voice, Polachek defies industry ideals of technologically-smoothed “correction” to insist on the flexibility and power of her own voice and visions.
Amy Skjerseth (PhD Cinema and Media Studies, 2022, University of Chicago) is Lecturer in Audiovisual Media and MA Music in Audiovisual Media co-director at the University of Liverpool. Her book project, Women’s Sonic Visions: Innovations in Pop Music Technology and Music Video Imagery, highlights artists from Ronnie Spector and Kate Bush to Jennifer Lopez and SOPHIE, as they have used technologies from magnetic tape to the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument and Auto-Tune to change women’s representations in pop music and audiovisual media. Her work has been published in journals from Film Criticism to The Radio Journal and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.
Inhuman or Posthuman Voices? The Effects of Extended Vocal Technique and Technology in Contemporary Music
Bojana Radovanović, PhD, Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Serbia
Guided by the ideas of monstrous body and voice introduced by Bojana Kunst and Jelena Novak, respectively, and Rosi Braidotti’s reflections on the posthuman subject theory, this presentation deals with contemporary voice in art and popular music. Those philosophical and theoretical concepts will aid the examination of the contemporary singing voice, or, more broadly, the voice in music, by centering the attention to the debate of human subjectivization through the voice and bringing the questions of performing technique and modern sound technology into the equation. Namely, in comparison to what has come to be a standardized singing voice in Western art and, to the lesser extent, popular music, I will look into the contemporary vocal practices utilizing extended vocal techniques and recording, manipulation/distortion, postproduction, and listening technologies, in order to question the relation to that very standardized vocal model. As suggested with the theoretical framework, the standardization of human practices through regulatory means and societal norms is interwoven in the very fabric of Western humanism. Among others, this regulatory system includes vocal behaviors (in music or otherwise), which were particularly challenged in the performing arts of the 20th century. Building on that momentum and following the idea of (bodily and technologically) expanded and mediated vocalizations in contemporary, mainly 21st century art music, electro-vocal music, extreme metal music and its crossovers, this presentation will propose the modes for analyzing the inhuman/monstrous and posthuman voices in those practices.
Bojana Radovanović is a research assistant at the Institute of Musicology SASA. She obtained her Ph.D. at the Department of Musicology, Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade, studying the relations of voice to vocal technique and new technologies in contemporary art and popular music. Her research interests include contemporary music and art, voice, metal music, art and media, and transdisciplinary research. She has published two books and co-edited one collective monograph. She is a co-founder and the editor-in-chief of the scientific journal INSAM Journal of Contemporary Music, Art and Technology.
The Cutting-Edge Vocals: Song-making as a New, Edited Artifice
Kiranmayi Indraganti, PhD, Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore
In the contemporary Indian film song production, this artifice is imagined/envisioned as multiple vocalities. Language and music have often worked as two pieces of long cloth that an editor uses to shape an aesthetically pleasing outfit. The cut is always according to what you have for the specific circuits and durations, implicating the cultural purport of the region(s). Changing technologies and market economies have long influenced the ‘cutting’ and ‘edging’ of vocalities to the image; editing has worked as a substantive device of production and distribution of film songs in the dubbed domain of the borrowed images and sounds.
Disengaged from the film, the contemporary film song has its material presence not in the enactment of actors on screen alone, but in the re-synchronized performance of singers to the camera as well: two distinctly drawn visible performances. One of the recent blockbusters, Pushpa (Telugu, 2021; dubbed into Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil and Hindi) exemplifies this. Each song has a tune which is enacted by the same actor but in different voices in different languages. Conversely, a specially edited song- promotion video, with nested frames of singers performing the song in their language, has garnered massive attention. Such videos invite the viewer to appreciate the cutting-edge artifice of language, vocals and the process of controlled sound recording. The ‘artistes’ punctuate their performance with specific inflections of language and music and make the ‘intoned’ process visible.
The paper aims to survey such phenomena in song performance where replaced voices define the language, the medium, its destination (aimed at a specific linguistic, theatrical or online audience, etc.) and its creative labor/production.
Kiranmayi Indraganti is a filmmaker and teacher with interests in film direction, screenwriting and the writing of histories of women art practitioners. She holds a PhD in Film Studies from the University of Nottingham, UK and an MFA in Film Production from York University, Toronto, Canada. She teaches at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore. Her publications include a chapter in Revisiting Star Studies (2017, Edinburgh University Press) and a book titled Her Majestic Voice (2016, Oxford University Press).
CHAIR: Francesco Venturi
15:00-15:15
Short break with
‘A chorus of geo-haptic tones’
by Felicia Konrad and Julieanna Preston
15:15-16:15
Artists’ Round Table 2: Voices/Bodies/Selves
Panelists
Christopher Newell, PhD, School of the Arts, University of Hull
Newell worked as an opera and theatre director for 20 years before gaining a PhD in Computer Science at The University of York with a thesis entitled ‘Place, authenticity, and time: a framework for liveness in synthetic speech.’ Since then, he has continued to use techniques derived from opera and theatre to experiment with text to speech systems. He produced a short film with the comedian and writer Lee Ridley exploring the absurd scenarios that can occur for persons obliged to use computer speech as the result of a disability. He is a lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Hull.
Dr Jess Richards, Massey University, New Zealand, and from January 2023, Faculty of Arts Humanities and Cultures, University of Leeds, UK.
Jess Richards is the author of three novels: Snake Ropes, Cooking with Bones and City of Circles, all published by Sceptre in the UK. She also writes short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry – many of these texts have been published in various anthologies. She is currently working on a creative nonfiction book called Birds and Ghosts. Jess lives in New Zealand with her wife, but will be returning to the UK in late 2022 to take up a Creative Writing Lectureship position at the University of Leeds. She completed her PhD, ‘Illusions, Transformations and Iterations: Storytelling as Fiction, Image, Artefact’, at Massey University in 2020.
Pak Hei (Alvin) Leung, PhD Candidate, University of North Texas
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Pak Hei (Alvin) Leung’s compositions have been played in the U.S., Italy, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong by music groups including Transient Canvas, the Rhythm Method String Quartet, Rosetta Contemporary Ensemble, Duo Zonda, Trio Mythos, Resonance, Stellar Trio, Music-Joint Association, Hong Kong Wind Kamerata, Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, Contrast Trio, Hong Kong Saxophone Ensemble and Romer String Quartet. His recent works are featured in EMM 2022, ICMC 2021, SCI National Conference 2021, NSEME 2021, Longy’s Divergent Studio 2021, Hong Kong Contemporary Music Festival 2020&2021, Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra Net Festival, SCI Summer 2020 Student Mixtape, Charlotte New Music Festival 2020 and others.Alvin is currently a PhD student in Music with a concentration in composition at the University of North Texas. He received a Master of Music degree at Bowling Green State University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Music from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). His principal teachers include Kirsten Broberg, Panayiotis Kokoras, Marilyn Shrude, Christopher Dietz, Mikel Kuehn, Wendy Wan-ki Lee, Victor Wai-kwong Chan, Hau-man Lo and Ricky Tse.
Pedro J S Vieira de Oliveira, PhD. Independent Researcher. Berlin, DE
Pedro Oliveira is a researcher, sound artist, and educator interested in the articulations of colonial sonic violence with a particular focus on the connections between voice, body, and citizenship at the borders of the EU. He is currently a fellow of the Junge Akademie der Künste Berlin under the program “AI Anarchies,” and holds a PhD from the Universität der Künste Berlin.
Shan Yun Wu, MA, Sound Design Pathway, Information Experience Design, Royal College of Art, UK
ShangYun Wu is a sound and media researcher, designer and creative technologist from Taiwan. Her research and artist practice has focused on “ SOUND+MEDIA ” aiming to shift perspective from how information is sent to how it is sought for shaping the human’s communication patterns, especially focusing on sonic information.
CHAIR: Merrie Snell
16:15-16:30
Short break with
‘A chorus of geo-haptic tones’
by Felicia Konrad and Julieanna Preston
16:30-18:00
Respondent – Katherine Meizel
Katherine Meizel is Professor of Ethnomusicology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her book Idolized: Music, Media, and Identity in American Idol was published in 2011; The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies which she co-editedwith Nina Sun Eidsheim, was published in 2019, and her monograph Multivocality: Singing on the Borders of Identity was published in 2020. Her public scholarship has appeared on sites such as Slate, the New Republic, NPR.com, NBC.com, and The Conversation. She also served as associate producer on the albumRaise Your Voice: The Sound of Student Protest with Little Village Foundation.
followed by plenary discussion and Vicarious Vocalities Network announcement(s)
CHAIR: Merrie Snell
19:00
WEDNESDAY EVENING SCREENING:
Sound and Video Works
HaHaHae
Paul Alan Barker
HaHaHae is a celebration of human laughter commissioned by the Kyoto Centre for Arts. It reflects on the earliest documentation of laughter and in its finished form as an interactive website it is designed to encourage the viewer to consider their reaction and assumptions about the sound of laughter.
Paul Alan Barker, Professor of Music Theatre, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
Paul Alan Barker has worked across orchestral music, chamber music, vocal and choral music in opera, dance, musicals, theatre, concerts and digital media. His extensive output across these genres has been performed and recorded internationally. Particular interests include the continuum between theatre and music, the human voice and the over-specialisation of education. His work has received awards and prizes internationally. Publications include Composing for Voice, now in its second edition for Routledge. He works as a composer, pianist, writer, vocal coach, conductor and theatre director.
FERVĒRE
Una Lee
‘FERVĒRE’ is a research-led artistic project and bi-lingual body of work consisting of multi-format pieces. In this project, I engage with the practice of homophonic translation as a means of excavating ‘over-, mis- and under-heard voice’, and address the particular entanglement of racism and sexism on Asian female body with references to such real-life incidents as Atlanta Spa Shooting and murder of Korean-American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. I narrativise and use the process of wild fermentation as a metaphor for survival of trauma, but also for (negative) intercultural assimilation. I will introduce, illustrate and share sounds/scenes/texts from ‘FERVĒRE’ and explore the ideas embedded in it. I will also present the sound work ‘Down Gone’ from the project in the evening event.
Una Lee, PhD, Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Lee works with sounds, stories and sensations, in perpetual pursuit of alternative storytelling. She seeks innovation in the contemporary marriage between performance and poetry, exploring human condition, memory, time, and our relationship with art and ecology, often drawing from her autobiographical events and her present identity as non-native in her habitat. She is a recipient of The Oram Awards 2020, and has performed and exhibited across the Northern hemisphere. She is a member of experimental group ‘HIVE Choir’, part of the duo ‘OULAN’, and co-director of the micro-label ‘quills that whisper’. She holds MA and PhD in Sonic arts from Queen’s University Belfast, at which she currently serves as Visiting Scholar.
Trans-Crypted Memory: A Transhumanist Techno-Pop Opera (2022)
Pak Hei (Alvin) Leung & Christine Drake-Thomas
Trans-Crypted Memory: A Transhumanist Techno-Pop Opera (2022) utilizes open- source Artificial Intelligence programs to generate the lyrical backbone of the work. The piece is in two acts that travel through time from the watery primordial beginnings of cyborgs to a period of modernist Romanticism to a speculative cyborgian future. This is musically explored by an interplay between AI-generated materials and human creativity. The symbiotic relationship between AI and human creatives suggest transhumanism’s advocation for humanity to conjoin with technology to reach the next phase of human cognition and evolution. For more information: https://foundlostintransit.wordpress.com/trans-crypted-memory-2022/
Pak Hei (Alvin) Leung, PhD Candidate, University of North Texas
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Pak Hei (Alvin) Leung’s compositions have been played in the U.S., Italy, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong by music groups including Transient Canvas, the Rhythm Method String Quartet, Rosetta Contemporary Ensemble, Duo Zonda, Trio Mythos, Resonance, Stellar Trio, Music-Joint Association, Hong Kong Wind Kamerata, Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, Contrast Trio, Hong Kong Saxophone Ensemble and Romer String Quartet. His recent works are featured in EMM 2022, ICMC 2021, SCI National Conference 2021, NSEME 2021, Longy’s Divergent Studio 2021, Hong Kong Contemporary Music Festival 2020&2021, Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra Net Festival, SCI Summer 2020 Student Mixtape, Charlotte New Music Festival 2020 and others.Alvin is currently a PhD student in Music with a concentration in composition at the University of North Texas. He received a Master of Music degree at Bowling Green State University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Music from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). His principal teachers include Kirsten Broberg, Panayiotis Kokoras, Marilyn Shrude, Christopher Dietz, Mikel Kuehn, Wendy Wan-ki Lee, Victor Wai-kwong Chan, Hau-man Lo and Ricky Tse.
https://www.alvinleung.com/
DESMONTE (A Zone of Nonbeing)
Pedro J S Vieira de Oliveira
DESMONTE (A Zone of Nonbeing) is a live performance for pre-recorded voice and electronics exploring vocal timbre at the limits of the (juridical and symbolic) body. The piece is a study on the so-called “automated dialect recognition” software in use by the German migration authorities since 2017 on cases of undocumented asylum seekers. (Mis)using spectral techniques similar to those found in the software design, the piece advances my argument that the German migration system conflates and confuses timbre with dialect, thereby reinforcing and reinstating colonial understandings of the relationships between voice, body, language, origin, and ultimately citizenship, to justify and enforce deportation. It is in understanding the failures of machine listening to be generative of different, unkowable relationships between voice and timbre that it might be possible for the voice to refuse to announce the body, and thus rethink (or unthink) the figuration of the “human” beyond its overrepresentation (to follow Sylvia Wynter). DESMONTE is entirely constructed with and through the voice of Brazilian death metal singer Fernanda Lira. Originally commissioned by Festival Novas Frequências 2021 and the INITIAL funding program of the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe and the Akademie der Künste Berlin.
Pedro J S Vieira de Oliveira, PhD. Independent Researcher. Berlin, DE
Pedro Oliveira is a researcher, sound artist, and educator interested in the articulations of colonial sonic violence with a particular focus on the connections between voice, body, and citizenship at the borders of the EU. He is currently a fellow of the Junge Akademie der Künste Berlin under the program “AI Anarchies,” and holds a PhD from the Universität der Künste Berlin.
< I, AI Create Together – SHANGAVATAR >
Shan Yun Wu
< I, AI Create Together – SHANGAVATAR > is a post-human project with artificial intelligence technology aiming to clone Shangyun herself as an avatar for replacing the social activities and performance activities which need to face a wider audience in her life. The project includes the experience from sociable talk to musical performance based on a human – ShangYunWu’s AI voice, exploring a new form of avatar form sonic experience from virtual reality to physical reality. The whole project is still in progress.
Shan Yun Wu, MA, Sound Design Pathway, Information Experience Design, Royal College of Art, UK
ShangYun Wu is a sound and media researcher, designer and creative technologist from Taiwan. Her research and artist practice has focused on “ SOUND+MEDIA ” aiming to shift perspective from how information is sent to how it is sought for shaping the human’s communication patterns, especially focusing on sonic information.
