Voice and Environment

This workshop will bring artists and scholars together for a sustained conversation on the theme of voice and environment. It will explore physical, cultural, sonic, and social interactions between voice and environment, as well as issues relating to atmosphere, climate change, precarious vocality, and varied physical and cultural dynamics of breath and breathlessness. How do our voices interact with the physical, cultural, political, historical, and cosmological milieus in which they are emplaced? Can attention to environmental concerns lead to a productive expansion of the category of voice, stretching it beyond the conventional parameters of the human body and aurality/sound? How might this expanded, posthuman conception of voice help us understand our place in a multispecies world? Can environments listen? Can environments speak or sing? Can humans give voice to nonhuman perspectives? These questions, which engage with recent art and scholarship on the Anthropocene, biopolitics, posthumanism, sound studies, and ecocriticism, will frame the exploration of the entangled dynamics of voice and environment. The workshop will include a panel of short position papers, and an intermedial performance, followed by a free-ranging discussion.

Zeynep Bulut’s research sits at the intersection of voice and sound studies, experimental music, and sound art. Bulut is a Lecturer in Music at Queen’s University Belfast and Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. Prior to joining Queen’s, she was a lecturer in music at King’s College London and a research fellow at the ICI Berlin. She is sound review editor for Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and project lead for the collaborative research initiative ‘Map A Voice’. Her current book project, Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin, theorizes the emergence, embodiment, and mediation of voice as skin. Her articles have appeared in various volumes and journals including Perspectives of New Music, Postmodern Culture, and Music and Politics.

In English

With

J. Martin Daughtry (New York University)
Zeynep Bulut (Queen’s University Belfast)
Daniel A. Barber (University of Pennsylvania)
Andreas Borregaard (Norwegian Academy of Music)
Naomi Waltham-Smith (University of Warwick)
Jessica Feldman (The American University of Paris)
Oriana Walker (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

Organized by

Zeynep Bulut and J. Martin Daughtry