{"title":"Composing with cetaceans: Countering human exceptionalism through a practical zoömusicology","authors":"Alex South","doi":"10.1386/jivs_00054_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jivs_00054_1","url":null,"abstract":"There is something paradoxical about the fact that while whales and dolphins produce some of the most complex vocalizations on Earth, they have little political representation or ‘voice’ and despite the success of past anti-whaling campaigns, continue to face existential threats from entanglement, ship strikes and underwater noise pollution. In this article, I argue that this paradox is sustained by a belief in human exceptionalism – exemplified by the claim that music is unique to humans – and review biological and musicological evidence that contradicts this claim. Overcoming the paradox may require more than logical argument, however, and I survey the use of humpback whale song field recordings in works of human music, analysing them along the dimensions of ‘distance’ and ‘difference’. I argue that although it is important to recognize the continuity between human music and humpback song, a more effective use of whale song recordings also requires attention to be paid to the differences between human and whale vocalizations to avoid the risk of collapsing into naïve anthropomorphism. Such an animalcentric compositional voice would operate according to the ideals of ‘difference without distance’ and ‘proximity without indifference’ to facilitate empathic relationships between humans and other animals.","PeriodicalId":36145,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49649353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Posthuman Voices: Channels across Time and Shared Memories","authors":"F. Bentivegna, Sophia Edlund","doi":"10.1386/jivs_00051_2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jivs_00051_2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36145,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47769833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sympoietic vocal practice","authors":"Ute Wassermann","doi":"10.1386/jivs_00056_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jivs_00056_1","url":null,"abstract":"In this Voicing, Ute Wassermann describes how sympoietic vocal practice brings her into resonance with the world in different ways, creating a complex network of relationships within her body between various vocal identities. Stories are told about how her many voices and the environment exist in a mutually stimulating feedback relationship. She gives examples of how her sympoietic voice collaborates with the polyphonies of other-than-human voices. She communicates with voices sounding from objects, and at the same time is influenced by them. Does her voice remain human, or will it become the other?","PeriodicalId":36145,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47364385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Voicetracks: Attuning to Voice in Media and the Arts, Norie Neumark (2017)","authors":"Milla Tiainen","doi":"10.1386/jivs_00059_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jivs_00059_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Voicetracks: Attuning to Voice in Media and the Arts, Norie Neumark (2017)\u0000Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 232 pp.,\u0000ISBN 978-0-26203-613-9, h/bk, $45.00","PeriodicalId":36145,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48955258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Auto, hyphen, open parenthesis, veu","authors":"Jaume Ferrete-Vázquez","doi":"10.1386/jivs_00057_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jivs_00057_1","url":null,"abstract":"A voice-based autobiographical performance work, developed by deep listening to a synthetic clone of my voice, serves as a point of departure to consider the aesthetic and sociopolitical implications of the modes in which voices are represented in speech synthesis. In the context of the rapidly increasing use of voice-based devices and virtual assistants, such as Amazon Echo and Alexa, I discuss how recently developed artificial intelligence techniques are being used to produce hyper-naturalistic voices that conceal the sonic markers left by their production processes. These attempts at technically reproducing voices that are naturalized, by becoming indistinguishable from their originals, are historically situated through the examination of a series of cases, such as Thomas Alva Edison’s Tone Tests. In addition, these show how, by closely listening to synthetic voices’ technically mediated difference, we may establish forms of affective relationship with them that can favour a lasting transformation of how voices are thought and produced.","PeriodicalId":36145,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies","volume":"6 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41269472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"AIELSON: A neural spoken-word poetry generator with a distinct South American voice","authors":"Paola Torres Núñez del Prado","doi":"10.1386/jivs_00052_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jivs_00052_1","url":null,"abstract":"Human–computer interaction will soon be framed as a dialogue in-between two agents, rather than the imposition of the needs and desires of the human entity over the inert machine. As the latter become seemingly more intelligent, we will witness how they reshape art, knowledge and society in general even more in the not-so-distant future. In this framework, decolonization of their algorithms becomes imperative so as not to reproduce the ethnic and cultural biases that prevail in contemporary human society. By using a pre-trained transformer-based language model (GPT-2) (Radford et al. 2019a), retrained with poetry in Spanish, fine-tuned on examples of South American poetry recited by two different text-to-speech synthesis systems – the Tacotron 2 (Radford et al. 2019b) + Waveglow (Prenger et al. 2018) – coupled posteriorly using the ESPnet-TTS toolkit (Hayashi et al. 2020), trained on an Argentinean voice dataset fine-tuned on voice snippets of Peruvian poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson, I came up with a selection of spoken-word poems in a distinctly Latin American voice that ended up presented as the El Tiempo del Hombre (‘The Time of Man’) album, printed on a set of four 7-inch lathe-cut stereo vinyl discs. This process turns into a self-reflecting gesture when the dataset used for training is based on South American Artistic Traditions of both the present and the past.","PeriodicalId":36145,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41731406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Computer’s Voice: From Star Trek to Siri, Liz W. Faber (2020)","authors":"F. Bentivegna","doi":"10.1386/jivs_00060_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jivs_00060_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: The Computer’s Voice: From Star Trek to Siri, Liz W. Faber (2020)\u0000Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 256 pp.,\u0000ISBN 978-1-51790-976-5, p/bk, $27.00","PeriodicalId":36145,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41938459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Agency, voice and prosopopoeia: SeeBotsChat and the projection of kinship","authors":"F. Bentivegna","doi":"10.1386/jivs_00044_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jivs_00044_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines a chatbots’ duet, a viral video stream that occurred in early 2017. SeeBotsChat happened online, across numerous different platforms but mainly on Twitch.tv. This article analyses the events concerning the streaming, exploring the relations between\u0000 the bots’ synthetic voices and the human listeners, focusing on how the audience enacted forms of affective care with the bots and their voices. Drawing on analysis of projected persona, narrative, prosopopoeia and bot design, my investigation of this event will try to understand how\u0000 the bots’ persona appears, what their voices entail, and if, and how, the audiences engage with them in forms of intra-action.","PeriodicalId":36145,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41690655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Owning Our Voices: Vocal Discovery in the Wolfsohn-Hart Tradition, Margaret Pikes and Patrick Campbell (2021)","authors":"A. Rome","doi":"10.1386/jivs_00050_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jivs_00050_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Owning Our Voices: Vocal Discovery in the Wolfsohn-Hart Tradition, Margaret Pikes and Patrick Campbell (2021)New York: Routledge, 222 pp.,ISBN 978-0-36713-322-1, p/bk, £34.99","PeriodicalId":36145,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46952500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Concerning the spiritual in voice","authors":"Odeya Nini","doi":"10.1386/jivs_00048_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jivs_00048_1","url":null,"abstract":"In October of 2021, I had the honour of being invited into the sacred space of days to hours before death, as I sang for a woman dying of breast cancer. I had never met Regine Verougstreate before, but in the almost two hours of singing for her while she gazed into my eyes and took\u0000 her last breaths, I had felt a timeless connection and a surrender that is hard to describe. I wrote these words as a stream-of-consciousness response to this experience and many experiences that I have had as a vocalist, from concert halls to marriage ceremonies, sharing sound from a place\u0000 of the highest intention to align and attune and become a vessel. How can we describe the spirit that becomes our voice? More so, how can we allow for spirit to become us? How do we release the mental grip that hijacks a preconceived idea of what it is to sing? Radical presence. Poetry. Love.\u0000 These are words that propose an opportunity to choose transcendence.","PeriodicalId":36145,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42019279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}