A Voice Is. A Voice Has. A Voice Does

Abstract

A Practice Research Output. 300-Word statement below. Research Process This Practice Research project investigates the intersections between autobiography, subjectivity-making, performed selfhood and voicing. Through the making and performance of a solo, intermedia performance-lecture, it proposes autobiophony as a new methodology for practice-based engagement with vocality for artist-scholars, teachers and trainees. It explores silencing, dysfluency, auditory racialisation, gendering and materiality through participatory and interactive vocal praxis, via workshop tasks embedded in the performance-lecture. Research Insights Presented in academic, pedagogic and artistic contexts, the project: • identified a new interdisciplinary area of research (vocal autobiography) and developed voicesensitive methodologies for investigating voice as part of one’s personal history (autobiophony); • subverted academic ex-nomination and logocentric approaches to vocal knowledge and proposed tools for locating voice-based research within the researcher’s, teacher’s, artist’s or trainee’s intersectional positionality; • facilitated co-creative methodologies of autobiophony through performances, workshops and talks and fostered a new lineage of autobiophonic practice through the work of voice lecturers and students. Dissemination 1. The core output was the performance-lecture A Voice Is. A Voice Has. A Voice Does., presented at the: (i) University of Exeter (2017, 2018, 2019), (ii) Norwegian Theatre Academy (2018), and (iii) the University of Portsmouth (2019). 2. Exegetical writing on autobiophony: • a 10,000-word article on the performance lecture in a peer-reviewed journal (2020) • an autobiophonic entry for an international academic blog (2019) • a short chapter (‘autobiophonic note’) in an edited collection (2020) 3. The theoretical context (vocal plurality and in-between-ness; critique of logocentrism; necessity for novel practice-based methodologies in vocal research) was set through: • a co-edited collection, including a co-authored introduction, a single-authored chapter and a short contribution to a ‘polyphonic conclusion’ (2015) • an editorial note on the rise of the voice-practitioner scholar and the intersectional positioning of contemporary vocal research (2019).