Description

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More than 200 years after the first speaking machine, we are accustomed to voices that speak from any- and everywhere. We interact daily with voices that emit from house alarm systems, cars, telephones, and digital assistants, such as Alexa and Google Home. However, vocal events still have the capacity to raise age-old questions about the human, the animal, the machine, and the spiritual-or in non-metaphysical terms-questions about identity and authenticity. In The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, contributors look to the metaphorical voice as well as the clinical understanding of the vocal apparatus to answer the seemingly innocuous question: What is voice?

From a range of disciplines including the humanities, biology, culture, and technology studies, contributors draw on the unique methodologies and values each has at hand to address the uses, meanings, practices, theories, methods, and sounds of the voice. Together, they assess the ways that discipline-specific, ontological, and epistemological assumptions of voice need to shift in order to take the findings of other fields into account. This Handbook thus enables a lively discussion as multifaceted and complex as the voice itself has proven to be.

About the Author

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Nina Sun Eidsheim is Professor of Musicology and Special Assistant to Dean, the Herb Alpert School of Music, University of California, Los Angeles. She has previously authored Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (2015) and The Sound of Race: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (2019). Katherine Meizel is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her book Idolized: Music, Media, and Identity in American Idol was published in 2011, and she wrote on American Idol for Slate from 2007 to 2011.