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- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2019
Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2019
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2019
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‘Easy listening’: Altered Auditory Feedback and dysfluent speech
By Maria StuartThis article is part of the emergent field of Dysfluency Studies (Eagle 2013 and 2014), an interdisciplinary approach drawing on literary/cultural analysis, clinical practice, neurological research and disability studies to challenge concepts of ‘normative’ speech and the pathologizing vocabulary that sustains them. While recognizing the widespread presence and function of the ‘metaphoric stammer’ in cultural practice, it places the corporeal, embodied experience of stammering at the centre of the work. Drawing on this reinvestment in the embodied speaker, the article explores the auditory aspects of dysfluency through a focus on three such ‘speakers’: George VI (as represented in the film The King’s Speech [Hooper, 2010]), composer Alvin Lucier (in his sound art piece I am Sitting in a Room) and vocal artist Victoria Hanna (Voicing Space, Sensing Speech). The King’s Speech provides the foundational basis for my focus on auditory ‘feedback’ (in its therapeutic and neurological forms), a focus that is then ‘amplified’ through the creative practice of Lucier and Hanna. Implicit in Tom Hooper’s film is the power of dysfluency to disrupt dominant narratives of normal speech, a generative power that finds fullest (yet individuated) expression in the embodied performances of Lucier and Hanna.
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It didn’t happen like this: Suicide, voice and witnessing in Dead Centre’s Lippy
By Jon VennThis article addresses the use of voice in the theatrical representation of suicide in Dead Centre’s Lippy, a play that engages with the real-life group suicide of a family of four Irish women in 2001. Following a discussion of how to negotiate the political and ethical components of the suicide and the play, the article suggests witnessing as a fruitful conceptual framework. However, it establishes the need to develop the conceptualization of witnessing from existing scholarship in two core modes. First, it denotes that rather than simply a particular mode of language or sight, witnessing can take place through voice; it explores how Lippy uses voice to delineate and question structures of power in the representation of the Mulrooneys’ suicide. Second, instead of conceiving witnessing as simply a radicalization of the audience’s spectatorship, or situating the audience as either as testifier, witness or meta-witness, witnessing is a process in performance that concomitantly involves all three of these positions.
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Redistributing the means of vocal production: Voice training as a tool of political intervention
By Sarah WestonIn this article, I explore the political and sociological potential of the practice of voice training, arguing that the training is an opportunity to redistribute vocal practices to groups of people for whom political voice is often denied. By drawing together Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ with the practice of Patsy Rodenburg and Kristin Linklater, I discuss whether training is one means through which participants can identify the ways in which the social and cultural have ‘marked’ their voice and, furthermore, whether training can provide a strategy to counteract and resist these marks, particularly in the female voice. I examine these questions through my own practice; through a series of voice projects I undertook with groups of young women across the north of England, I explored the connection between engaging in voice training and the young women’s own conception of their political voice.
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Resounding legacies: Remembering Cicely Berry
For this Voicing, the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies invited contributions by people who worked with seminal voice and speech trainer Cicely Berry (1926–2018) and who – in their work with major performance institutions ranging from the National Theatre, UK, to Sydney Theatre Company – have been in ongoing dialogue with her ideas and practices. Jane Boston, David Carey, Lyn Darnley, Kate Godfrey, Charmian Gradwell, Charmian Hoare, Barbara Houseman, Charlie Hughes-D’Aeth, Stephen Kemble, Nia Lynn, Jeannette Nelson and Patsy Rodenburg reflect on the ways in which their work intersected with Berry’s and, in doing so, they collectively capture significant moments of change and development in twentieth- and twenty-first-century pedagogies.
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Deep muscles, deeper understanding: An investigation into abdominal muscle activation during vocalization and the impact of active training for the stage actor
Authors: Robert Lewis and Marie-Louise BirdStage actors need breath control for voice projection and resonance. However, little is known about the abdominal muscle activation during vocalizations of different sounds and different lung volumes. The impact of training on muscle activation is likewise under-reported in the literature. This Voicing describes the content of an intervention used in an intensive six-week series of training workshops and forms the basis for a research project where muscle recruitment before and after was measured in both trained and untrained performers. Through participation in this intensive workshop, an untrained performer demonstrates changes in muscle recruitment with reduced activation of the global muscles and improved muscle efficiency.
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A vocal journey through the language of zaum
More LessCoined by Russian mathematician and writer Velimir Khlebnikov, the term zaum means beyond mind. It is used to describe experiments in sound symbolism and linguistic creation stemming from Russian Cubo-Futurists of the early 1900s, including the work of poets Alexei Kruchenykh and Vasily Kamensky. This trans-rational language was born out of aesthetic ideas that epitomized a vision of a society to come, one based on the revolutionary fervour of the time. My argument concerns its relevance within a contemporary context of the twenty-first century, in which new aesthetic parameters are being created and defined. I shall develop this thesis by means of material taken from two of the above authors that threads its way through a series of performance projects based on my own practice as research. Questions on the role of zaum in interdisciplinary vocal studies will be outlined and then addressed throughout the course of this journey in a process of analysis from the perspective of my compositional ideas and methodologies. My aim is to reveal the existence of clear evolutionary links between what was essentially a voco-sonic invention and contemporary artistic practices of alterity, multiplicity and fragmentation.
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A singer’s perspective on Sirens and singing: An interview with coloratura soprano/conductor Barbara Hannigan
Authors: Sophia Edlund and Barbara HanniganThe Sirens appear in one of the most iconic literary episodes on music-making and music-hearing, in Homer’s twelfth book of The Odyssey (2018: 194), singing an irresistible and lethal song. While the myth of the Sirens’ song has continued to exist for almost three millennia in various formats, this Voicing queries the relevance of the myth as a reference for the practice of singing and examines the experiences of a classical singer who works within contemporary music and has embodied Sirens in performance. Following a short scholarly introduction that questions the role of the singing voice in the Siren song, practitioner-scholar Sophia Edlund interviews Canadian interpreter of contemporary music, soprano/conductor Barbara Hannigan, specifically asking her to consider the meaning of the Sirens and their symbolic value for singing. In this interview, Barbara Hannigan compares her music-making practice with the speculative practice of ‘Siren-ing’, pointing to similarities, such as being in a state of metamorphosis during singing, as well as divergences in terms of how singing is practised and understood.
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Reviews
Authors: Ting Guo, Andrew Kimbrough, Joshua S. Duchan, Miriama Young and John TebbuttThe Sociolinguistics of Voice in Globalising China, Dong Jie (2017) London and New York: Routledge, 160 pp., ISBN 978-1-13879-880-9, h/bk, £115.00
Theatre & Voice, Konstantinos Thomaidis (2017) London: Palgrave, 89 pp., ISBN 978-1-13755-249-5, USD 17.99, £ 6.99
Karaoke Idols: Popular Music and the Performance of Identity, Kevin Brown (2015) Bristol: Intellect, xvii + 152 pp., ISBN 978-1-78320-444-1, p/bk, $36
Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body, Jelena Novak (2015) Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera, Dorchester: Ashgate, 192 pp., ISBN 978-1-47244-103-4, h/bk, $120; ISBN 978-1-13850-496-7, p/bk, $49.95
The Voice and its Double: Media and Music in Northern Australia, Daniel Fisher (2016) Durham and London: Duke University Press, 320 pp., ISBN 978-0-82236-086-9, h/bk, $99.95; ISBN 978-0-82236-120-6, p/bk, $26.95
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