Building a Voice

On the emergence, embodiment, and mediation of voice as skin.

How do we build a voice, instead of giving a voice to something or someone, or being given a voice? Can we imagine the voices we make in the form of a skin, a multi-sensory interface that behaves as both boundary and contact? What does such a voice capacitate in times of crises and uncertainties?

In Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin, Zeynep Bulut explores these questions. She examines multi-sensory and collective forms of voice making in experimental music, sound, and media art in conversation with the use of voice in creative interventions for environmental crisis, experiences of voice hearing, and digital technologies of artificial and tactile speech. Through this conversation, she points to two key terms: plasticity of voice, and non-dialogue. Plasticity of voice indicates both malleable and resistant aspects of voice. Non-dialogue refers to cross-sensory, non-dyadic, and distributed modes of interaction across both humans and nonhumans. The plasticity of voice and non-dialogue, Bulut argues, encourages us to think about voice in the form of a skin, a surface that both connects and differentiates, without being limited to human body or labels of verbal language.

Building a voice as skin, in effect, prompts us to reflect on both individual and collective, concrete and emergent, and uncertain and shared aspects of voice and speech, as well as to pace and revisit our conceptions of communication, intersubjectivity, connectivity, understanding and empathy.