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The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies

Online ISBN:
9780199338641
Print ISBN:
9780199982295
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies

Nina Sun Eidsheim (ed.),
Nina Sun Eidsheim
(ed.)
Music, University of California, Los Angeles
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Nina Sun Eidsheim, Department of Musicology, University of California, Los Angeles

Katherine Meizel (ed.)
Katherine Meizel
(ed.)
Ethnomusicology, Bowling Green University
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Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology, Bowling Green State University

Published online:
13 June 2019
Published in print:
25 July 2019
Online ISBN:
9780199338641
Print ISBN:
9780199982295
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

More than two hundred years after the first speaking machine, we are accustomed to voices talking from seemingly anywhere and everywhere, including house alarm systems, cars, telephones, and digital assistants, or “smart speakers” such as Alexa and Google Home. However, vocal events still have the capacity to raise age-old questions regarding the human, the animal, the machine, and the spiritual—or in nonmetaphysical terms, questions about identity and authenticity. Individuals and groups perform, refuse, and play identity through vocal acts and by listening to and for voice. In this volume, leading scholars from multiple disciplines respond to the seemingly innocuous question: What is voice? While also emphasizing connections and overlaps, the chapters show that the definition and ways of studying of voice is diverse. Many of the authors have worked on connecting voice research across disciplines, seeking to cultivate this trend and to affirm the development of voice studies as a transdisciplinary field of inquiry. It includes diverse standpoints at the intersections of science, culture, technology, arts, and the humanities. While questions of voice address crucial issues within the humanities—for example, the relationships between voice, speech, listening, writing, and meaning—the book also seeks close interaction with the social sciences and medicine in the search for a more complete understanding of these relationships. The term voice studies is used in this context as a specific intervention, to offer a moniker that gathers together otherwise disparate intellectual perspectives and methods and thus hopes to facilitate further transdisciplinary conversation and collaboration.

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