Singing and Listening as an Intermaterial Vibrational Practice
Thursday 10th October 2024, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM (London Time)
'In this session, I will discuss my practice-based research which focuses on the materiality of singing and listening. I will ground the discussion in my book, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Duke University Press, 2015), offering participatory exercises to help students begin to build their own vocal theory based on their practices.
Brief background:
After decades of working as a voice teacher and singer, I developed a framework for thinking about the physical voice, singing, listening, and the materials through which we sense the voice (for example, air) as vibrational practice. If we consider a vocal sound to be a node along an unrepeatable intermaterial vibrational continuum, concepts such as “in tune/out of tune,” “good/bad,” or “right/wrong” no longer make sense. This idea also forwards the ethical dimensions of singing and listening: to hear a voice is to sense its vibration through your body. Moreover, it refutes the notion that singing is for the sense of audiation alone, allowing us to explore the multi-sensoriality of both singing and listening.'
Nina Eidsheim
Nina Eidsheim is the author of Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice and The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music, and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies and Refiguring American Music.
Attend this course for as little as £22 as part of the Voice Professional Training CPD Award Scheme.
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We have plenty of upcoming short courses coming soon. See details of some of them below or look at the full list of short courses.
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Monday 15th June 2026
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