Voicetracks: Attuning to Voice in Media and the Arts

In Voicetracks, Norie Neumark tracks voice across its various registers -- across the affective and the symbolic, the literal and the metaphorical. Neumark considers both traditional scholarly concerns and the resonances of voice for the listener who responds to the calls of creative works. She engages with the affects, aesthetics, and ethics of voice in the new materialist (or post-humanist) turn while also engaging with the thinking that happens in the making of art. She does this through the lens of her encounters with creative works in media and the arts, bringing into conversation ＂situated knowledge＂ and ＂carnal knowledge＂ (in this sense, the recognition of the body in knowledge) with theoretical and critical discourses around voice, sound, media, and the arts.

Developing the figure ＂voicetrack,＂ Neumark evokes both the literal -- the actual voices within the works she examines -- and the metaphorical -- a new materialist exploration of voice encompassing human, animal, thing, and assemblages. She examines artists working with animal sounds and voices; voices of place, placed voices in installation works; voices of technology; and ＂unvoicing,＂ disturbances in the image/voice relationship and in the idea of what voice is. Finally, she considers ethics and politics, and describes how her own work has shaped her understandings and apprehensions of voice.