Multivocality

Abstract

This book frames vocality as a particularly holistic way to investigate the voice in music, as a concept embodying all the implications with which voice is inscribed—the negotiation of sound and Self, individual and culture, medium and meaning, ontology and embodiment. Like identity, vocality is fluid, constructed and reconstructed continually; even the most iconic of singers do not simply exercise a static voice throughout a lifetime. The book highlights such singers in vocal motion, focusing on their transitions and transgressions across genre and gender boundaries, cultural borders, the lines between body and technology, between secular and religious contexts, between found voices and lost ones. And as 21st-century singers habitually perform across styles, genres, cultural contexts, histories, and identities, the author suggests that they are not only performing in multiple vocalities, but more critically, they are performing multivocality—creating and recreating identity through the process of singing with many voices, at once produced by and in resistance against neoliberal expectations. Multivocality, in its focus on the suppressions and soundings of voice in various borderlands of identity, works toward a deeper understanding of voice as a technology of the self and of culture.

Listening to Anohni's variously vibrating voice: studying transfeminine vocality in 21st-century popular music culture through the concept of vocal figurations

“…In popular music studies, queer and feminist analyses have investigated how artists may use stylistic conventions, vocal technique and studio technology to perform and deconstruct gendered and sexualised vocalities (cf. Dickinson 2001;Weheliye 2002;Dame 2006;Steinskog 2008;Hawkins 2009;Jarman-Ivens 2011;Pecknold 2016;Muchitsch 2016Muchitsch , 2020Meizel 2020). More recently, initial studies of transgender singers in popular music (cf.…”