The overarching question motivating this strand of work is: How can we entice audiences to explore the ways their own vocal bodies could voice differently, and to feel and reflect on why these different sounds might matter to them - to both produce and to hear and feel them? Timbre is a huge motivator here, because I have asserted that one of the reasons authoritarian culture tries to bottle up unusual voicings is because persons with power don’t want to ‘feel’ the ‘touch’ - the vibrations - and the textures - of these voices, for feeling would be accepting contact with non-normative bodies, and risking that one might like or love these bodies, and then want to stop oppressing them - collapsing the authority patterns of dominating regimes of power. So, silencing = keeping the regime of oppression alive. The drivers of these projects all decanted from ideas first proposed in Bonenfant’s article Queer Listening to Queer Vocal Timbres (2010, Performance Research 15:3).
Voice-Styling is a research theme that explores how we can give different kinds of audiences a sense of agency over the ways their voices sound. The voice, like many aspects of identity, is often treated like it’s a fixed thing - immovable - something that we can’t transform or play with. But, we know that while a part of how our voices sound is biologically rooted, other parts of how they sound are deeply encultured, and thus the product of often largely unconscious choices that we make about how we want to/ should/ or are expected to sound. What’s more, our perception of the identity of a person who voices has a huge component of imagination to it: our capacity to recognise voices is much more malleable and open to prejudice than we might think. In different ways, all of the pieces and concepts in Voice-Styling try to find different ways to bring these questions around the production and perception of identity through voice to different demographics. There is a strong intersection of this project with queer studies and queer politics - in the sense that when we open out the voice to other kinds of sounds - we have to ask - why is the voice so policed in day to day life? Why are non-normative uses of the voice considered so alarming or disturbing? What non-normative bodies do these voices suggest and why do they trouble some and delight others? This strand of work generated intertwining projects: Touching your Voice Inside Out R+D concept; Curious Replicas; We Wink We Wink our Voices Blink; Wig Show R+D & Workouts, plus a range of related research publications and a symposium. Contact me for access to the full audiovisual research exhibition.
