In A Voice and Nothing More, Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar writes, ‘what language and the body have in common is the voice, but the voice is part neither of language nor of the body’.Footnote ¹ And in For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero points out that, ‘unlike the gaze, the voice is always, irremediably relational […] it has no object’.Footnote ² Konstantinos Thomaidis and Ben Macpherson, the editors of Voice Studies, a new collection of essays published by Routledge, draw inspiration from both of these influential thinkers regarding the essential nature(s) of voice. Instead of conceiving of voice as an object, Thomaidis and Macpherson propose that we understand voice as occupying an aural space of being perpetually ‘in-between’, as something ‘complex and ineffable’ (4). Voice is not located simply in the body, in an expressive utterance, or in language; rather, it is elusive and can be investigated only at the interconnection of multiple entities. Moreover, Thomaidis and Macpherson argue that it is not productive to speak of only one voice (‘there is […] no definite article: the voice does not exist’ (4, original emphasis)). Voice, rather, is a plurality – the ‘junction point for multiple encodings of experience to be negotiated and understood’ (4). These re(framings) of voice underlie the essays in Voice Studies and are critical for understanding both their content and their contribution to existing scholarship.

In recent years, ‘voice studies’ has emerged as the name for an interdisciplinary field of inquiry investigating the complex interconnections of physiology, acoustics, and aesthetics enabled by voice in relation to social, cultural, and embodied meaning-making. The coherence of the field is still being debated, but many agree that it is borne out of growing interdisciplinary interest in, and concerns with, aurality and sound studies in the academy more generally. While voice has been a topic of study for many years, there has not yet been an attempt like Voice Studies to bring together such interdisciplinary perspectives under the rubric of ‘voice studies’. The result is a much-anticipated and highly useful collection of essays, reflections, and interventions on voice from diverse angles. This volume joins together twenty-two different perspectives from artists, performers, and scholars working largely in theatre and performance studies, musicology, sound art, and media studies. In so doing, the volume fills a gap in scholarship by addressing voice ‘not merely as a theme, but as a discrete area or critical methodology’ (4). To that end, the volume is divided into an introductory section (Part I) and then three main parts that address, as the book's subtitle indicates, voice as process (Part II), voice as practice (Part III), and voice as experience (Part IV). The collaborative polyphonic conclusion of this volume, entitled ‘What is voice studies?’, proposes alternative conceptions of the field from the perspectives of its multiple contributors.

The most common theoretical threads connecting chapters in this volume include engagements with Cavarero's feminist critique of logocentrism in Western philosophy (see, for example, chapters by Thomaidis, Macpherson, Mikhail Karikis, Johanna Linsely); Dolar's Lacanian psychoanalytical approach (see, in particular, Piersandra Di Matteo, Ella Finer, George Burrows); Steven Connor's notion of the ‘vocalic body’ (Macpherson);Footnote ³ Don Ihde's ‘auditory imagination’ (Norie Neumark);Footnote ⁴ Michel Chion's audiovisual body-voices (Karikis);Footnote ⁵ and Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology (Tim Kjeldsen).Footnote ⁶ These threads work in connection with the volume's overall theme of ‘in-betweenness’ by addressing questions of voice in terms of process, performance, and experience.

Several essays especially stand out for their novel approaches to theory and methodology for voice studies. For example, Finnish mezzo-soprano Päivi Järviö, who writes about ‘the embodied “now” of the musician–singer–pedagogue who performs’ (25), creatively draws on the material phenomenology of Michael Henry to argue that an embodied experience of interiority for singers precedes any mental construct that might be used in pedagogical practice. Tara McAllister-Viel's chapter insightfully discusses the cross-cultural limitations of importing the pedagogical ideas (and ideologies) of Kristin Linklater's ‘freeing the natural voice’ training method to classrooms in the Korean National University of Arts.Footnote ⁷ Two essays that are especially theoretically engaging are those by Macpherson, who crafts a history of visualization of voice with an eye towards putting the visceral body back into technologies of visualization, and Neumark, who constructed her essay as a series of interviews with radiophonic voices from Australia that ‘performatively evoke’ (143) enchantment and wonder in sound art.

A number of other contributors were equally provocative in applying auto-ethnography as a methodology. In addition to Järviö’s piece mentioned above, Kjeldsen's chapter on the dialectic of freedom and control in navigating tension and release in the passagio vocal register in singing is insightful and engaging. Marios Chatziprokopiou's piece on silence and vocal excess in lament both in the field and at home is touching and evocative. And Eidsheim's essay on underwater opera singing is astute in alerting our attention to multi-sensory perspectives on voice in performance that ‘recognize sounds as affective and open-ended processes’ (115).Footnote ⁸

Just as many of Voice Studies’ individual essays are noteworthy, so are its overall themes and its contributors’ backgrounds. This volume leans more towards theatre studies as a focus for its case studies, embodied practice as a methodology, and Europe as the home base for most of its contributors. More than 50 per cent of the twenty-two contributors specialize in drama, theatre, or performance studies; 40 per cent share some specialism in musicology or music performance; and 20 per cent specialize in media studies or some other form of artistic practice. An overwhelming majority of the contributors are based in Europe – primarily at institutions in the United Kingdom – while the others are based in the United States, Nigeria, Australia, and Singapore. These facts are significant because previous collections on voice have tended to focus more on music than theatreFootnote ⁹ and on digital media technologies more than situated and embodied vocal practice.Footnote ¹⁰ In addition, previous projects have drawn more from communities of scholars based largely in the United States or Australia.Footnote ¹¹ This volume, in contrast, offers various viewpoints from a European-based scholarly community that are decidedly practice-based, theatre-centric, and methodologically diverse.Footnote ¹² Apart from being valuable in their own right, the essays in Voice Studies may reflect a welcome diversification of scholars in the field of voice studies, as well as of our understanding about what that field is about.

As this discussion suggests, I applaud Voice Studies for its practical approach to researching questions of voice, its focus on experience, its methodological diversity and experimentalism, and its efforts to forge an interdisciplinary – and international – voice studies community. This collection will work especially well for masters and graduate students in voice across the disciplines of theatre, performance studies, music studies, vocal performance, sound art, and media studies. However, the collection's ethnographic and cross-cultural contributions are weaker than its analysis of Western European artistic practice, voice in media, and pedagogy for singing and speaking on the stage. Indeed, despite the editors’ introductory discussion about how to reframe the concept of ‘voice’, I see Voice Studies more as a methodological collection for how to do expressive voice research and analysis than as a compendium for proposing advancements to major theoretical conversations. In this sense, the collection is best viewed as an excellent contribution by offering current and practice-based research approaches that examine voice(s) vis-à-vis emerging interdisciplinary concerns in the field of voice studies.

As a result, some readers will yearn for more novel theoretical paradigms for conceiving of what voice(s) is/are or can mean in different contexts. Beyond the brief references to Krahô lament in Brazil (Chatziprokopiou), Javanese shadow-puppet voices (Jan Mrázek), and the short but powerful reflection on indigenous West African hermeneutics of voice by Femi Adedeji in the conclusion, the collection would benefit from a richer representation of the diversity of vocal cosmologies.Footnote ¹³ In addition, the volume largely focuses on vocal traditions and practices from the northern hemisphere and Western Europe, and, aside from a brief contribution from communications and speech disorder specialist Diane Sidtis, there is little engagement with perspectives from voice science and vocology.Footnote ¹⁴ Finally, the essays do not do enough to draw connections with new works by North American scholars in sound and voice studies, ethnomusicology work on cross-cultural vocal epistemologies, or questions of voice in cultural and linguistic anthropology.Footnote ¹⁵

One of the main problems with articulating a vision for the future of voice studies is that most attempts tend to include anything and everything voice-related. As a consequence, one of my ongoing concerns in the field of voice studies is that perspectives are so diverse, and methods and experiences so divergent and personalized, that conversations have become increasingly hyper-specialized with researchers steeped in their respective areas. Theoretical synthesis and, as Macpherson indicates in the final chapter, common goals and frameworks are crucial at this point in the development of voice studies as a field. To this end, Voice Studies should be commended for its effort to bring together many diverse approaches while also attempting to create a full and accurate picture of what voice studies is in 2015.

In addition, among the most useful contributions posited by this work is that vocal practice and experience are necessary for critical intellectual and theoretical research in the academy. However, given the book's laudable emphasis on voice in practice, performance, and experience, the book could have proven its point better by including more ethnographic writing on voice that does not rely on references to canonical works in theory and philosophy. Future research in voice studies would do well to include multi-modal ethnographic experiments in theory-building. This gap highlights one of the persistent issues in academic research on expressive studies more generally: the problem of reconciling theory and practice. Some readers might sense a contradiction in Voice Studies on this point: on the one hand, the editors claim that we need a better theoretical framework to bring together a diverse group of people working to forge a voice studies inter-discipline; on the other hand, many pieces in this collection remind us that we need to let embodied knowledge speak through working with our actual voices. This contradiction is healthy! It is emblematic of the fact that much more work needs to be done to articulate a vision for the future of voice studies and the role it will play both in and out of the academy.

Thomaidis, Macpherson, and the many contributors to Voice Studies have produced a well-edited, useful, and enjoyable collection of essays. By emphasizing the plurality and ‘in-betweenness’ of voice through process, performance, and experience, the essays enrich our understanding of vocal expression and the possibilities that a burgeoning field of voice studies has to offer. They also highlight how much more research, theorizing, and practice we have left to do.