The Limits of Hearing: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Vocal Materiality and Expression

Clara Hunter Latham

Edison’s Ghost

David W. Samuels

Thomas Edison’s futurist thoughts about the twentieth century modernity he helped to invent imagined a central place for hearing in urban spaces. He argued that deafness was simply Darwinian adaptation to modern circumstances. Edison’s hearing impairment thus ushered in the urban man of the future. At the same time, he worried about extraneous noise in musical performance and sought ways of controlling or eliminating it. In this essay I explore some of Edison’s agenda-delineating statements and their implications for still-current ethical distinctions between biology, physics, and aesthetics, noise and music, and literal and poetic signs.

Vocal Materiality and Expression in Intentionally Compromised Vocal Physiology: The Cause and Effect of the Castrato Superstar Luigi Marchesi

Talya Berger

In this essay, I analyze Pichl’s transcriptions of Marchesi’s vocal acrobatic display—virtuosity and technique due in part to ‘natural gift’ and in part to the unnatural physiological intervention of castration. The essay compares each variation and provides an analysis contextualized by historical performance practices and by specific analysis of the music and text that provided the basis for Marchesi’s extraordinary vocal pyrotechnics.

Ableism and the Reception of Improvised Soundsinging

Chris Tonelli

Planes, Walls, and Bits of Sound: Healing a Voice

Zeynep Bulut

This article discusses how the non-linguistic voice in avant-garde and experimental music can unsettle and expand on the normative limits of the knowledge of the voice, language and speech. Drawing on Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room, and on cases of stuttering, verbal and psychic deafness, I address the following questions: How can the embodied sound of the voice be deployed as a performative tool to challenge and “heal” speech irregularity? And what do “speech irregularity” and “healing” mean in this context?

Matters of Empathy and Nuclear Colonialism: Marshallese Voices Marked in Story, Song, and Illustration

Jessica A. Schwartz

In this article, I define Marshallese voices in terms of material and political representations. The word for voice and sound are the same in the Marshallese language (ainikien). Voice is its sonorous materiality, but it also represents the throat, where various physiological and emotional processes coalesce. Marshallese body perception of the throat as the center of the emotions also speaks to larger notions of connectivity, communication, and social values. Marshallese social organization is based on land and lineage, specifically, land is inherited through matrilineal orientation. Unlike western notions of property, every Marshallese is born with land and thus rights on and from that land. Decolonization, as a form of nation building, depends on a Marshallese politics of the voice. These voices mark colonial encounters and two political ontologies.

About the Authors