Singing and Listening as an Intermaterial Vibrational Practice

'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.'