Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies - Vicarious Vocalities, Simulated Songs, Apr 2023

In writing the histories of film practitioners such as C. Krishnaveni, one recognizes the value of how their vocalities, literal and metaphoric, as observers, creative artistes and enablers are indicative of the form that cinema has historically taken within specific spaces of language and culture. This article reviews key themes and developments around the encoding of voices of early actors and singers, places their contribution in the cultural and linguistic context of South India and notes their historical position in innovating with cinematic technologies and creating new musical and narrative materials.

Describing his early compositional processes as ‘butchering’ in conversation with Simon Reynolds, the songs and voices that James Leyland Kirby, also known as The Caretaker amongst other aliases, has obsessively reworked, looped, stretched and otherwise deconstructed, appear as ghosts, eternally trapped in auditory labyrinths of melancholy decay; the sonic equivalent of stirring bottomless pools of murky water. Drawing on conceptions of hauntology from the work of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Mark Fisher (1968–2017) and others, this article will explore The Caretaker’s use of ‘butchered’ voices in The Haunted Ballroom Trilogy and Patience (After Sebald), to explore the deconstructive labyrinths that are intrinsic to his work in Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom (1991) onwards.

This article explores the stereotype of the ‘tiny girl with the big voice’ and discusses three singers, Jackie Evancho, Hollie Steel and Connie Talbot, who competed in televised talent competitions America’s Got Talent and Britain’s Got Talent at aged 10 or under during the early 2010s. Today, as adults in their twenties, the three women continue to pursue singing careers, navigating the public scrutiny that inevitably follows female child stars as they grow up. The first half of this article explores how the talent competitions framed the apparent incongruence between the young girls’ voices and bodies and their dehumanizing objectification in the press as ‘singing angels’ or ‘freaks’. Adapting a term from Jennifer Fleeger, the article describes these singers as ‘mismatched girls’. The second half of the article examines recent transformative moments in the adult lives of Evancho, Steel and Talbot that demonstrate how the women have used musical performances and social media to reimagine the relationship between their voices, bodies and identities. Managing their own careers and star texts as adults today, they transcend the ‘mismatched girl’ stereotype, refuting the cultural myth that certain voices inherently belong with certain bodies.

Review of: Singing Through Change: Women's Voices in Midlife, Menopause, and Beyond, Nancy Bos, Joanne Bozeman and Cate Frazier-Neely (2020)

Suquamish, WA: Studiobos Media, 200 pp.,

ISBN 979-8-62231-764-4, p/bk, $23.99