Mattering Voices: Studying Voice through New Materialisms

Mattering Voices advances mutually enriching relationships in-between the transdisciplinary fields of voice studies and new materialisms. This is the first edited volume to explore how the theoretical, methodological, and analytical possibilities of both voice scholarship and new materialisms gain further depth and directions through their co-constitutive—intra-active—relationality. In this book, voice researchers from performance studies and philosophy, artistic research, musicology, ethnomusicology, sound studies, feminist and gender research, and educational studies develop new materialisms-influenced approaches to voice and voice studies-inspired adaptations of new materialisms in the empirical study of various kinds of voicing. The topics covered range from voice in artistic practices and contemporary academia to new notions of musicality and vocal atmospheres, as well as the significance of singing in gendered senses of self and interspecies relations. By experimenting with intra-actions of voice studies and new materialisms, the book proposes fresh ways of researching and grasping how voices matter: how they materialize as events and practices and acquire meanings. As a polyphony of voices, this volume invites readers into entangled conversations about how voice emerges— creating modes of being, knowing, and co-existing—and what it might still become.