Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies. Edited by Nina Sun Eidsheim and Katherine L. Meizel. (June 2019) (original) (raw)

More than two hundred years after the first speaking machine, we are accustomed to voices talking from seemingly any- and everywhere. We interact daily with voices emitting from house alarm systems, cars, telephones, and digital assistants, or “smart speakers,” such as Alexa and Google Home. However, vocal events still have the capacity to raise age-old questions regarding the human, the animal, the machine, and the spiritual—or in non-metaphysical terms—questions about identity and authenticity. Moreover, individuals and groups perform, refuse, and play identity through vocal acts and by listening to and for voice. In this volume, leading scholars from multiple disciplines respond to the seemingly innocuous question: What is voice? While also emphasizing connections and overlaps, the chapters show that the definition and ways of studying of voice is ever so diverse. In fact, many of the authors have worked on connecting voice research across disciplines. We seek to cultivate this trend and to affirm the development of voice studies as a transdisciplinary field of inquiry. It includes diverse standpoints at the intersections of science, culture, technology, arts, and the humanities. While questions of voice address crucial issues within the humanities—for example, the relationships between voice, speech, listening, writing, and meaning—we also seek close interaction with the social sciences and medicine in our search for a more complete understanding of these relationships. We use the term voice studies in this context as a specific intervention, to offer a moniker that gathers together otherwise disparate intellectual perspectives and methods and thus hope to facilitate further transdisciplinary conversation and collaboration.