Matters of Voice

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and made possible by support from Marta Sutton Weeks, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities

There is an inherent excess in voice—it resounds both within and outside meaningful speech. The topic of voice is inherently polysemic and lends itself to interdisciplinary inquiry. For Roland Barthes, what lies outside meaningful speech in a voice is “the cantor’s body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down cavities, muscles, cartilages and language.” For the philosopher Adriana Cavarero, voice does not simply resound within meaningful speech, it enables it. Speech is inherently relational and given voice “communicates one’s own uniqueness to another unique being,” it ensures speech is occurring between two different people. Departing from these two premises, the Matters of Voice workshop aims to support research agendas that engage with both the embodied nature of voice (drawing from the disciplines of music, film, sound studies, performance studies, and gender and sexuality) and its relational nature (drawing from the disciplines of literature, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy). Ultimately, this workshop aims to foster continuous collaboration between these seemingly parallel running research tracks.