Introduction
Poised on stage in front of a microphone and alongside an array of technological and musical devices set up in San Francisco's blackbox ODC Theatre, composer and multidisciplinary performer Pamela Z premieres Voci (2003), an eighty-minute multimedia work that the artist describes as a ‘polyphonic mono-opera’.Footnote 1 Through a series of eighteen scenes, Z layers live vocal performance with video projections, audio samples, digital delay, and other audio effects. She manipulates the audio effects and triggers samples using the BodySynth, an electronic device that converts bodily movements into expressive musical control signals. In an eponymous section of the work, Z creates a pointillistic rhythmic texture consisting of looped vocal clicks and clacks, along with pulsating and sustained tones, over which she speaks matter-of-factly: ‘announcer voice / anxious voice / Asian voice / authoritative voice / bashful voice / black-sounding voice’. Z's encyclopaedic listing continues as she outlines a variety of affective, vocational, geographical, gendered, national, and ethno-racial markers of difference ascribed to the voice.
Z's Voci intervenes into the relationships between the voice, body, race, and gender, especially as those relationships are mediated through musical and communications technologies that contribute to a posthuman imaginary – a notion describing the human's decentring through technological, environmental, and informational networks.Footnote 2 For N. Katherine Hayles, this figure of the posthuman further challenges the liberal humanist subject through forms of technological disembodiment.Footnote 3 Already Z's use of digital delay loops recapitulates in miniature the process of capturing, storing, and replaying sound endemic to audio recording – a technology whose discourse since the phonograph has been haunted by representations of its requisitely disembodied sources as otherworldly or non-human ghosts. Voci addresses this dynamic directly. Z concretizes the concept of acousmatics – or sound whose source is unknown or disembodied – for instance, in ‘La Voce nella Doccia’, a scene in which she exits the stage to sing bel canto, leaving the audience with the sounds and a faint image of a shower.Footnote 4 Through the litany of vocal identities listed previously, furthermore, Z points to the simultaneous disembodiment and hypercorporealization that applies especially to recordings of non-white subjects. As Alexander G. Weheliye argues, ‘Paradoxically, black voices are materially disembodied by the phonograph and other sound technologies, while black subjects are inscribed as the epitome of embodiment through a multitude of U.S. cultural discourses.’Footnote 5 Such an instance of what Hayles has called ‘embodied virtuality’, here ascribed to recording technology and its relationship to the Black voice, is central to this study of Z and posthumanism.Footnote 6
Z's use of music technologies such as the BodySynth furthers her reflexive engagement with a posthuman imaginary through the metaphor of cybernetic musical control. The BodySynth, although initially conceived as a dance technology, is understood generically as an ‘alternate controller’, a musical tool that allows a performer to manipulate various musical parameters in real time.Footnote 7 Construed as alternatives to electronic keyboard controllers, alternate controllers such as the BodySynth communicate using the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), a protocol standardized in 1983 for use with audiovisual devices and instruments. With an explicit emphasis on control, alternate controllers inherit cybernetics’ paradigm of the command and regulation of complex systems. Furthermore, many controller interfaces emerge from the kind of biofeedback that Hayles locates, in How We Became Posthuman (1999), as first-order cybernetics’ originary locus of the posthuman.Footnote 8 ‘Transform your body into a musical instrument. Become a multi-media [sic] controller.’ ‘Biofeedback!’ offer BodySynth creators Chris van Raalte and Ed Severinghaus.Footnote 9 Such a transparent notion of control, of course, remains under threat from idiosyncrasies such as latency (unwanted lag introduced by digital signal processing) up to full technological failure (e.g., computer crashes).Footnote 10 Nevertheless, the BodySynth uses biofeedback to tether musical parameters directly to bodily movement.
This article considers the posthuman body, including its virtualized extension as the voice, in order to analyse Z's work in light of critiques of posthumanism found in Black feminist theories of the human. The conditional dyad that terminates ‘An Encyclopedia of Voices, Human and Otherwise’, the title of the New York Times review of Z's performance of Voci in 2004 at The Kitchen, ostensibly refers to the work's incorporation of the voices of answering machines, bird songs, and other non-human sources/bodies.Footnote 11 Yet another association of the non-human voice concerns precisely the extended effects of those bodies expressly excluded from the dominant category of the human during its inception as the Western masculine liberal subject. Z's work has been variously considered through cyborgian, Afrofuturist, and posthumanist discourses.Footnote 12 But rather than affirm her practice as fully consonant with technological visions of the posthuman, I argue that she challenges the very liberal humanism upon which the posthuman is built. For a key tenet of liberal humanism, as Weheliye observes, was the racial and gendered apportionment of humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans. We have never been completely human, he suggests, let alone posthuman.
Z uses technologies of the embodied voice to confront both the posthuman imaginary and the continued effects of its ideological preconditions in racio-colonial liberal humanism. In another Voci scene, ‘Voice Studies’, Z engages the problem of ‘linguistic profiling’ as it applies to housing discrimination, citing the work of Stanford linguistics researcher John Baugh. Against a backdrop of percussive vocalizations, Z explains, ‘Studies reveal that people can often infer the race of an individual based on the sound of their voice’, subsequently playing back recordings of housing applicants with vocal signifiers of racial difference.Footnote 13 The article then contrasts this kind of ‘aural dimension of race’ found in Jennifer Lynn Stoever's notion of the ‘sonic color line’ with Pierre Schaeffer's attempt to separate sound from the social – as well as from bodies and identities – in his practice of acousmatic reduction.Footnote 14 With this in mind, I show how Z construes the voice as an acous(ma)tic technology of embodiment while reframing opera's humanist legacy through Voci's polyvocal narration of ‘prehuman’, ‘human’, and ‘posthuman’ imaginaries. ‘Polyvocality’ stands for Z's shifts in register, her shuttling between the vocal codes of opera, experimental music, popular music, punk rock, jingles, and the objective voice of scientific rationality.Footnote 15 Moving with and against a posthuman imaginary, Z's Voci ultimately attests to how we never became posthuman.
‘How we were never posthuman’: posthumanism, Black feminism, and the body
Some of the most interesting challenges to posthumanism have come from Black studies and Black feminist theories of the human. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues, for instance, that ‘gestures toward the “post” or the “beyond” effectively ignore praxes of humanity and critiques produced by black people, particularly those praxes which are irreverent to the normative production of “the human” or illegible from within the terms of its logic’.Footnote 16 Such gestures beyond the human, she contends, inevitably appear as attempts to move beyond race. Rather than any kind of futural ‘post’, Jackson advocates a refractory understanding of the concept of the human in the historically informed present through a kind of anamorphic queering of perspective that ‘mutates the racialized terms of Man's praxis of humanism’.Footnote 17 Relatedly, Weheliye insists that ‘the posthuman frequently appears as little more than the white liberal subject in techno-informational disguise’,Footnote 18 proposing as a corrective a meeting between technology and the Black voice. Analysing this confluence through Black feminist theories of the human, Weheliye pursues alternatives to the human by seeking to dislodge it from ‘man’.
Liberal humanism, which originally advanced an understanding of the human as man, was central to the market relations that gave rise to capitalism. One can thus approach this problem through the critique of political economy.Footnote 19 In How We Became Posthuman, for instance, Hayles cites political economist C. B. Macpherson's A Theory of Possessive Individualism, which locates the foundations of liberal humanism in the identification of a Cartesian subject as a mind that possesses a body rather than being a body. Through this logic we arrive at the conditions for (and, paradoxically, also the results of) the legal property relations that define liberal market humanism. In the words of John Locke: ‘every man has a property in his own person’.Footnote 20 That ‘man’ in this formulation represents the Western masculine white subject, while expressly subjugating Black and non-male bodies, is precisely the point. Responding to Hayles, Weheliye turns to liberal humanism's foundations in racial subjugation as the basis of a different critique of posthumanism. For Weheliye, Locke's ‘man’ represents ‘the human as synonymous with the heteromasculine, white, propertied, and liberal subject which renders all who do not conform to these characteristics as exploitable nonhumans, literal legal no-bodies’: hence liberal humanism's apportionment of humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans.Footnote 21 This is not to de facto correlate liberal humanism with racism, nor is it to discount the work of modern liberal antiracists or, historically, the work of antebellum abolitionist humanists such as Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman.Footnote 22 But a critical engagement with posthumanism must nevertheless contend with liberal humanism's legacy as a condition of possibility for the radical oppression of those human bodies it deemed as somehow less-than or not-at-all human.
It is pertinent to consider, then, Black feminist theories of the human that foreground the body. For Hortense J. Spillers, the sociopolitical order of the New World represents not only a scene of ‘mutilation, dismemberment, and exile’ but also a ‘theft of the body – a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire’. Even after being granted the illusion of possessing a body, the flesh continues to be oppressed through the instruments of what Spillers calls ‘hieroglyphics of the flesh’.Footnote 23 For Sylvia Wynter, the body appears as the outcome of an interface between biology and language: the very construction of the human is at once a linguistic one – what she calls genres of the human: we ‘performatively enact ourselves as being human in the genre-specific terms of an I and its referent We’ – and a result of the kind of autopoietic ‘languaging living system’ advanced by second-order cyberneticians Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.Footnote 24 Standing at the nexus of social systems, the biological sciences, and the humanities, Maturana and Varela's ‘realization of the living’ (the subtitle of their 1992 Autopoiesis and Cognition) informs Wynter's analysis of how, in Katherine McKittrick's words, ‘our present analytic categories – race, class, gender, sexuality, margins and centers, insides and outsides – tell a partial story, wherein humanness continues to be understood in hierarchical terms’.Footnote 25 Neither settling for an unreconstructed humanism, nor advocating for its complete (uncritical) abolishment due to its racio-colonial baggage, Wynter calls for its strategic reinvention through a kind of cultural-biological ‘feedback loop’.Footnote 26
Z similarly reimagines the human through musical (bio)feedback loops and technologies of the embodied voice. At the same time, her work insists on an interrogation of race and gender not only in music technology but also across a broader cultural and historical field that sutures the voice and embodiment onto the problem of the (post)human. Delays are feedback loops. The delay effect described earlier, which has been a mainstay in Z's work ever since she bought an Ibanez DM1000 Digital Delay unit, functions explicitly by subjecting an input signal to a recursive feedback circuit. With this technology, Z was able to, in her words, ‘find a new voice’.Footnote 27 In Voci, Z uses this new voice to sing and speak a kind of meta-commentary on the voice's cultural, historical, and political dimensions. Originally using hardware devices, Z later recreated these delay effects using the interactive music programming language Max/MSP. This configuration allowed her to control her delays and other parameters with physical gestures in real time using the BodySynth.Footnote 28
Z uses the BodySynth to extend the voice musically while complicating technological notions of control. Alternate controllers such as the BodySynth have recently been considered in discussions of what Atau Tanaka calls ‘embodied musical interaction’: instances of human–computer interaction (HCI) that shift from concerns with performance optimization to a focus on ‘experience and meaning-making’.Footnote 29 Considered alongside Black feminist theories of the human from Spillers and Wynter, Z's meaning-making reaches beyond ideas of ‘expression’ in music technology contexts and, furthermore, speaks to the legacy of liberal humanism.Footnote 30 In light of Z's 2004 sound installation for Dak'Art (the Biennale of Contemporary African Art held on Gorée Island), which consisted of cries and whispers evocative of the island's massive deportations of slaves, her work with the BodySynth may even suggest a link between cybernetic control and the radical notion of control inherent to slavery and colonialism.Footnote 31 Cybernetician Norbert Wiener, in fact, compares slavery to the possibility of full machine automation, which although sharing ‘most of [its] economic properties’, avoids in his view slavery's ‘direct demoralizing effects of human cruelty’.Footnote 32 Far from an attempt to move beyond race, Z stitches it into the very fabric of her work using technologies of the embodied voice.Footnote 33
Rather than supplemental, the voice and its relationship to the body are central to Weheliye's critical notion of Black posthumanism, which Z productively protracts, I think, in her polyvocal performances. Whereas for Jackson the very notion of ‘beyond the human’ invokes an explicitly white and fully colonial metaphysics, Weheliye leaves open the possibility of, and ultimately argues for, a Black posthumanism.Footnote 34 Such a vision, while engaging paradigms of techno-informational and cybernetic control, rejects the fully disembodied virtuality at play in Hayles's work by arguing for the voice as a strategic technique of embodiment. At the same time, Weheliye provides an alternative to the influential work of Kodwo Eshun, who envisions an Afrofuturist-inflected Black posthumanism that, in addition to privileging Black instrumental music, accords with an alien otherworldliness. Instead, Weheliye's posthumanism turns on the voice and its relationship to the body via recording technology. He cites the work of Lindon Barrett, who argues in his Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (1999) that the Black voice has served as a unique form of value within African American culture not only as an instrument of survival but also as a mode of (extra-)discursive expression that contrasts with and subverts the white economy of literacy from which Black subjects were historically barred.Footnote 35 Here I want to look closer at this reference to Lindon Barrett as it allows for an important point regarding a deliberate inauthenticity found in Z's acousmatic techniques of embodiment.
Specifically, Barrett differentiates between the signing voice and the singing voice: the former represents, synecdochally, the white humanist subject through the ‘sleight of hand’ of Enlightenment thinkers Hobbes, Locke, and Kant wherein human subjectivity became equated with the ability to read and write, while the latter stands for an undoing of the former through the kind of ‘sly alterity’ heard in the Black voice from spirituals to Billie Holiday.Footnote 36 Furthermore, the Black singing voice, as Weheliye explains, suggests ‘a rather different access to the Enlightenment category of humanity from the signing voice, and in the process undermines the validity of the liberal subject as the quintessence of the human, instead providing a fully embodied version thereof’. He continues, ‘Black subjectivity appears as the antithesis to the Enlightenment subject by virtue of not only having a body but by being a body.’Footnote 37 Recording technology plays against the hyperembodiment ascribed to Blackness since the Enlightenment by disembodying the Black singing voice through technological virtuality. As we have seen, Z engages this dynamic with her delay loops and the acousmatic voice, but she also creates distance between the body and the voice, thus calling into question their uncomplicated fusion. Opposed to a transparent technological authenticity in which the recorded Black voice requisitely belongs to a body – and this is Weheliye's critical intervention into Barrett's study – Weheliye views the tension therein as a tactic of embodiment, or a ‘technique of corporeality’, inherent to his Black posthumanism.Footnote 38
Z mobilizes such posthuman techniques of corporeality while revoicing tensions pertaining to the Black voice and its historical phono-linguistic-musical status. This is not to essentialize the Black voice, or to insist upon an authenticity ascribed to, for instance, the use of African American Vernacular English (or AAVE), but rather to suggest that Z reflects as an artist on the construction of these categories and listeners’ attendant expectations. Along these lines, Lewis cautions:
At first blush, Z's classically trained vocal identity seems to defy easy identification with the set of vocal timbres most routinely identified as ‘African’ or ‘Afro-American’, and consequently the association here may seem indirect for listeners and critics unfamiliar with the long history of engagement of Africans on both sides of the Atlantic with pan-European vocal tropes.Footnote 39
Beyond such easily identified tropes, Z deploys a range of polyvocalities that productively interrogate such associations. For instance, in Voci's ‘Qwerty Voice’, the title of which refers to the Latin-script keyboard design used in typewriters since 1873, Z uses a form of Sprechgesang to gesture toward Barrett's signing/singing problematic. The scene begins with her sitting at a desk on stage while typing on a manual typewriter. After a series of key strikes, she rolls back the platen and reads/sings from the page: ‘DTK! R-JVV, Wo-HAH! FV-JAAY … NNNGuo, Wahl ee-WE! Nng, G-k, k-k, k-k, k-K’.Footnote 40 Given its staging within a multidisciplinary performing arts venue, such a scene could be contextualized in light of canonical sound poetry ranging from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti to Kurt Schwitters to John Cage's Sixty-Two Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham (1971).Footnote 41 These artists and their works are said to emphasize the materiality of language often at the expense of its signifying properties, however latent or explicit the latter may be.
But given her posthuman interfacings between race, gender, and technology, Z's use of the typewriter here connotes, on the one hand, the historically gendered status of this early form of ‘digital’ labour: as Friedrich Kittler notes, by 1930 the profession was so suffused with women that the very term ‘typewriter’ referred interchangeably to the machine and its female operator (a posthuman/cyborg assemblage if there ever was one!).Footnote 42 On the other hand, Z's vocalizations point to the New World reception of the Black voice as an incomprehensible ‘disturbance’Footnote 43 – a reception whose effects continue to be felt in the marginalization of composers and performers of colour including Black women and transgender subjects in today's new and experimental music circles. Such a reading of ‘Qwerty Voice’, moreover, emphasizes the role of language as a technology not only in recent anthropological species-differentiating understandings of the human (discussed by thinkers ranging from Bernard Stiegler to Gary Tomlinson) but also in their precursors in Enlightenment thinkers’ construction of the ‘human’ as an oppressive racializing category tied to literacy. If the subaltern can speak, what are their phono-linguistic-musical conditions of possibility?
In her movement from typo-grapheme to vocal-phoneme, Z underlines the instability between the written word and its vocalization – an indeterminacy of the signifier long considered the stuff of poststructuralism – in her shuttling between the signing and singing voice. Here, as with her aforementioned ‘La Voce nella Doccia’, Z employs the kind of subversive perceptual play that turns as much on what is presented as what is not. Unable to verifiably ‘match’ sight to sound, that is, audiences cannot read her typewritten page, just as Z is acousmatically hidden from view, and hence ‘disembodied’, when she sings her offstage bel canto alongside the shower image. A similar phenomenon becomes the subject of her discussion of vocal profiling in ‘Voice Studies’, where housing discrimination is achieved by ‘matching’ race to voice. Altogether Z's gestures play against a sense of the strict authenticity Weheliye criticizes in Barrett's argument while resonating with the techniques of corporeality central to the former's notion of Black posthumanism. Through such uses of the polyvocal voice, furthermore, Z interrogates the hierarchical division between ‘whiteness’ and ‘Blackness’ marshalled through an invisible yet vocalized echo of the color-line said to have defined the twentieth century.
(Un)hearing the acousmatic color-line
Z's techniques of vocal embodiment not only function as cultural and artistic metaphors that intervene into a history of raced and gendered hierarchies but also refer to social processes with material effects in the present. In Z's ‘Voice Studies’ scene, she discusses the work of John Baugh, a Stanford University linguist who has devoted his career to the study of ‘linguistic profiling’ following an incident in which he was discriminated against when applying for housing upon relocating to Palo Alto, California, in 1988. Tests conducted by the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), he notes, have routinely revealed evidence of similar forms of discrimination based on the sound of a caller's voice. Baugh points further to a paradox in which perpetrators of such profiling, when queried, claim to have no knowledge of linguistic markers of perceived racial difference, while in practice, they not only claim to recognize the race of callers but also use this information to deny service to callers of colour. Meanwhile, in courtrooms, layperson witnesses often claim to possess enough phono-linguistic knowledge to reliably identify the race of a speaker in the absence of visual cues.Footnote 44 How, then, are we to understand this kind of double bind in which the Black voice is simultaneously overdetermined and undervalued – especially as mediated through audio technologies? How do disparate sense modalities, and their respective forms of technological mediation, figure in such a problem? How can they work against it?
Z elaborates forms of acous(ma)tic performance that speak to the voice's inherent inter- and extrasensorial aspects – its constitution across language and the senses – while intervening into constructions of race and gender. As a way to contextualize such techniques of the embodied voice, I want to turn here to recent studies of the Black voice and its historical sites of technological mediation. The ‘sonic color line’ is Stoever's inventive term for the ‘aural dimension of race’, which she locates primarily but not exclusively in the voice.Footnote 45 Stoever develops the concept as an extension of W. E. B. Du Bois's notorious 1903 color-line, itself already an imbrication of optical and geometric metaphors that, taken together, describe the hierarchical racializing discourse and practices of the era writ large. In his watershed autoethnography, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois infamously prophesies that, ‘The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.’Footnote 46 Du Bois supports this thesis through a variety of scopic metaphors including blindness/sight, his theory of double-consciousness, and the veil.Footnote 47 The veil is an analogue to the color-line. It points to Black subjects’ simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility while providing a ‘second sight’ capable of viewing the truths of white hegemony despite the latter's enforcement of Black self-understanding through its own normative lens. As a way of hearing Du Bois's veil, Stoever locates a range of acous(ma)tic figurations in Du Bois. In addition to the transcriptions of spirituals that Du Bois uses as epigraphs for each of Souls’ chapters, the book includes accounts of opera, screams, wails, silences, and the noises of industry, along with the author's resolute championing of Black music. For Stoever, this makes Du Bois ‘the “articulate” Pythagorean figure whose voice traverses the sonic color-line between black and white audiences as well as aural and written epistemologies’.Footnote 48
The veil, which has remained an important figure throughout African American literature since Du Bois's Souls, has occupied a privileged position in theories of sound and recording technology, especially from across the Atlantic since the 1950s. Schaeffer invokes the Pythagorean veil in his version of acousmatics, which refers to the philosopher's practice of lecturing behind a curtain so as to prevent disciples from being distracted by his bodily gesticulations.Footnote 49 Intended to separate the causes of sounds from the sensorial effects for a listener, this practice, which Schaeffer terms entendre or ‘reduced listening’, figured as a form of phenomenological reduction modelled after the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Theorists have roundly criticized Schaeffer's thinking as promoting an essentializing form of technologically mediated listening ultimately unable to account for the social. Patrick Valiquet refers to Schaeffer's evacuation of ‘bodies, desires, and identities’,Footnote 50 while Brian Kane contends that Schaeffer's ‘ahistorical view of technology, sound, and listening’ is premised on an ‘anti-natural’ separation of the senses that ‘bars direct access to visible, tactile, and physically quantifiable assessments’ of phenomena.Footnote 51 In this sense, Schaeffer's acousmatics not only deracinates sounds from the network of causal relations that produces them but also restricts the polyvalent experience of music – seen especially in opera – to the monosensorial domain of sound.
If the sonic color-line stands for the aural dimension of race, Schaeffer's acousmatics sought to exclude race as well as politics from the listening experience. Radio was central to Schaeffer's development – as it was for Du Bois and for Z – although it resulted in markedly different attitudes toward race.Footnote 52 During the early 1950s, alongside his musique concrète composing, Schaeffer was sent by the French government to consult for and repair the infrastructure of the Société de radiodiffusion de la France d'outre-mer (SORAFOM), a network of radio stations connecting the French colonies in Africa, of which he served as the director from 1956 to 1957. This endeavour was, according to Noé Cornago, the first serious effort to provide the French African colonies with the technical means of producing their own radio broadcasts, which helped set the stage for decolonization. Indicative of a sedimented Western humanism, however, Schaeffer's sincere yet ‘somewhat paternalistic’ commitment to improve critical African infrastructure was marked by a profound ambivalence: ‘SORAFOM was an expression of poetic neo-colonialism’, he writes, ‘and at the very same time a rather prosaic form of decolonization.’Footnote 53 Writing of the role of the SORAFOM stations in the independence processes of the French African colonies, Schaeffer went so far as to insist, ‘The history of radio-diffusion and political history have been absolutely coincidental.’Footnote 54 Nonetheless, following this experience, Schaeffer proffered his acousmatics theory that tacitly separated such a political history from a listener's experience.Footnote 55
Z's work in radio led not to a restriction to phenomenological listening but to an artistic approach that operates across the senses. Z explains that at while working as a public radio programmer at Boulder, Colorado's KGNU, she led a free-form music program called ‘The Tuesday Afternoon Sound Alternative’, which included such a variety of music that it required, as she saw it, inventive connections between selections. Her way of smoothing out the otherwise irregular shifts between Edgard Varèse, Laurie Anderson, the Residents, and the Ramones was to create short audio loops that she could mix in between tracks. Combined with other media, this segue technique would later become an important device in her compositions. ‘I had all of these little pieces, ideas that I had come up with’, she notes. ‘I had to work out: how do I make that all hang together as a show? So, I did a lot with visuals, and projected images, and segues where I would make loops out of something – and that loop keeps going – and then it segues right into some other thing.’Footnote 56
Beyond purely formal devices, Z's delay loops figure in her commentary on the voice as a cultural and political object. In addition to outlining the political stakes of Baugh's linguistic profiling, Z poses the acousmatic problem of identifying a sound's source in cultural-geographical terms. In another section of Voci's ‘Voice Studies’, Z builds up a texture consisting of looped clicks and clacks as she puts on a blazer, complementing her ‘objective voice’ with a visible sense of authority. ‘Linguists have observed some correlations between geographical regions’, she explains. ‘In European languages, isolated click sounds, for example are only used as meaningful noises, such as the English “tut tut” or “tsk tsk” click often used to express disapproval[, w]hile in many African languages these sounds are included in the normal system of vowels and consonants.’Footnote 57 The loop, which began as a seemingly abstract texture providing cover for her wardrobe change, is re-coded, ex post facto, as an illustration of the geolinguistic phenomenon she describes. As an extension of the acousmatic, here the vocal sounds’ ‘unknown’ source is not their physical site of production – we clearly saw Z make the clicks and clacks herself – but rather their cultural-geographical source of reference, which only later becomes evident through Z's discursive explanation.
Such segues between language, sound, and non-sonic media in Z's work form a kind of polyvocal circuit. The voice, even when isolated, can be understood as a technology that creates a feedback loop with the ear due to the inevitability of hearing oneself speak. As the site of vocal production and reception, the body both facilitates and constrains this feedback loop.Footnote 58 Radio and recording technologies externalize it, expanding the circuit spatially while extending it in time and inserting it into history. If Schaeffer's acousmatics suffers from an ahistorical barring of the body and social meaning, thinkers such as Du Bois, Weheliye, and Stoever suggest a historically situated and embodied listening dependent upon yet irreducible to the interconnected circuits of technology, race, and gender. Z routes these polyvocal nodes across the eighteen scenes of her posthuman opera, Voci.
Voci as posthuman opera: re-narrating the human
Opera has always used technology. The technologies discussed previously – radio, sound recording, costume, and even the telephone – have been integral to its development, and many have played roles in opera's constructions of race and gender. Philosopher Lydia Goehr discusses the telephone services offered between the 1880s and 1920s in which subscribers listened to entire operas via an earpiece.Footnote 59 Stoever, Nina Sun Eidsheim, and Rosalyn Story consider white critics’ often disparaging coverage of the pre-technological performances of some of the first African-American women opera singers such as Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, along with the impact of recording technology, radio, and other broadcast media on the reception of performers such as Marian Anderson.Footnote 60 Technologies of the Gesamtkunstwerk of course have not been limited to the audible and include scenography, architecture, lighting, and makeup. Naomi André describes her being made aware of the continued use of blackface until as recently as 2012 in the Metropolitan Opera's production of Verdi's Otello (1877) via the Met's digital televisual Live in HD series.Footnote 61 Since the 1803 invention of the limelight, directors have been able to accentuate any body on stage.Footnote 62 Often highlighting the existing marginalization and typecasting of Black opera performers, such technologies, while not universally negative in their effects, have nonetheless cast the kinds penumbrae that André has critically termed Black opera's ‘shadow culture’.Footnote 63
Prior to opera's use of digital media, its technological history extends back to the Italian Camerata's invention of the art form in the context of Florentine humanism at the turn of the seventeenth century. The Camerata, a society of Florentine musicians, poets, philosophers, and scholarly nobility members, sought to recreate ancient Greek drama based on the presumption that Greek drama was sung throughout.Footnote 64 This programme arose from the Camerata's deployment of the humanistic principle of imitatio, or the imitation of classical art.Footnote 65 They simply copied ancient Greek culture – but an inaccurate version of it. In addition to the primary ‘borrowed’ musical device of ‘singing speech’, known as recitativo or parlar cantando, the Camerata also relied upon the architectural technology of the Greek proscenium stage, the writing technology of musical notation already in circulation across Europe, and the libretto, which it adopted from pre-existing narrative literary and dramatic theatrical forms. The Camerata created opera not only in the technological image of a Renaissance revival of ancient music drama, but they also used the new art form to promote a Florentine humanism that ultimately set the stage for the Enlightenment's own humanist vision of ‘man’.
Considering this coterminous development of opera and humanism, Voci's operatic status, rather than incidental, provides an important frame for considering the posthuman. Throughout Voci, Z uses a range of opera technologies from the past, present, and future that combine and interweave, often anachronistically, while she examines ways they contribute to both humanist and posthumanist imaginaries. Shifting forward and backward in imagined time, such a dynamic recalls Wolfe's understanding of the posthuman that, following Lyotard's postmodernism, occurs both ‘before and after’ the human of humanism.Footnote 66 In this sense, Voci amplifies this chronological interpenetration between the human and its posthuman afterthought. Yet as I have argued with Z's techniques of corporeality, here I contend that Voci's narrative premise moves simultaneously with and against a posthuman imaginary by troubling the status of the liberal humanism upon which posthumanism is based. How, then, does such narrativity, as essential to the operatic form, unfold in Voci?
If there is a formal correspondence between Voci and opera's general structure, then it inheres less in the succession of acts occurring over the course of its eighty minutes and more in the work's allegorical layering of temporal imaginaries of the human. The New York Times review focuses on Voci's synchronic ‘encyclopedic’ aspect, and the Washington Post concludes, to Voci's supposed fault, that ‘there's no dramatic structure’.Footnote 67 However, I think Voci has more in common, formally, with operatic narrative than these characterizations let on. There are of course narratives within many of the acts themselves; for instance, in ‘Voices in Your Head’, Z tells the story of her mother who suffered from schizophrenia. Yet, more significantly, a narrative structure in Voci emerges through the imbrication of its imagined technocultural pasts, presents, and futures. Such a structure parallels Bruce Clarke's notion of narrative as ‘the mode of deliberate allegory’ that ‘leap[s] from one level of signification to another’.Footnote 68 As a kind of metanarrative that implicates an audience, then, Voci leaps from the level of self-contained story to allegorical staging of the ‘pre-’ or ‘non-human’, ‘human’, and ‘posthuman’.
For Z, these categories unite under the primary signifier of the voice. Voci begins with ‘The Larynx’, a multimedia meditation on the human voice's anatomical production. The scene starts with a series of pre-recorded technical descriptions of the voice, which she triggers and manipulates with the BodySynth and over which she intones ‘oo’, ‘ah’, and ‘oh’ sounds.Footnote 69 This is followed by ‘It is the Voice’, an aria beginning with ‘Your Voice has a pungent smell’ and attributing to the voice further synaesthetic qualities including texture, taste, colour, and size. Voci contains eighteen such scenes, each lasting roughly between ninety seconds and ten minutes and using one of various configurations of sung and spoken voice (with delay and reverb effects), instruments and/or objects (water cooler bottle, typewriter, telephone, mobile phones), media (pre-recorded and/or triggered audio, projected video, monitor panel video), lighting, costumes, and audience participation. Z uses the BodySynth to alter digital signal processing effects, trigger various audio samples, and play an ‘air cello’ in ‘Cellovoice’. Other scenes focus on relationships between the singing voice and instrumental sound. In ‘Metal/Vox/Water’, Z sings into three hanging sheets of metal with attached piezo microphones, and with a pitch-to-MIDI conversion process she uses her voice to trigger various speech samples. ‘Bone Music’ consists of a non-texted vocal melody sung over a subtle percussion loop created by striking an empty water cooler bottle. ‘Voice Lesson’ collages multiple traditions of vocal pedagogy as Z responds to the recorded voices of three different teachers: bel canto opera, Balkan, and Tuvan throat singing. Finally, the work ends with the previously discussed eponymous scene ‘Voices’. Here is a full list of scenes:
For the remainder of this analysis, I want to focus on Voci's simultaneous stagings of ‘prehuman’, ‘human’, and ‘posthuman’ imaginaries through Z's uses of communications technologies and her techniques of the embodied voice. In addition to representations of such technologies from the past, present, and future (e.g., typewriters, mobile phones, and artificial intelligence), Z also refers to the voices of non-human animals. In ‘Birdvoice’, Z draws attention to an imagined continuum between the human, animal, and machine – a constellation already at work in Wiener's Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine and extended in the more recent work of Wolfe, Donna Haraway, and Brian Massumi.Footnote 71 The scene begins with Z triggering birdsong samples using the BodySynth. She then uses an onstage keyboard MIDI controller to transpose one of the birdsongs (with duration linked to pitch) several times to land roughly two octaves lower in pitch and four times the original duration. At that point, she uses her voice to imitate the bird melody, as it is now within her vocal range.Footnote 72 Numerous writers have discussed the relationship between the human and the non-human animal at play, for instance, in Western art music's extensive historical references to birdsong, which include imitation, transcription, and field recordings.Footnote 73 What follows, however, focuses on Z's construction of a posthuman imaginary through references to communications technologies, cybernetics, and opera.
An exemplary meeting between cybernetics and opera, Voci's ‘Ebben n'andrò lontana’ channels music-technological representations of desire by juxtaposing a late nineteenth-century Italian aria with artefacts of natural language processing and computational linguistics. The scene begins with a text-to-speech voice reciting, with poor pronunciation, the Italian libretto of the first aria of Catalani's La Wally (1892), with each line followed by an English translation created using the online translation tool BabelFish. The output volume of this computer-generated voice is reflected visually in a pulsating Macintosh speaker icon projected via video, over which the libretto appears when Z enters the stage and begins singing the aria. An obvious disparity inheres between the awkward rigidity of the ‘Victoria’ Macintosh system voice and Z's languid rendering of ‘Ebben n'andrò lontana’. At the same time, though, both ‘systems’ – opera and computational linguistics – embody certain comparable shortcomings regarding language and communication. On the one hand, the operatic voice, with its rigorous forms of stylization, often loses intelligibility across translations; hence Z's use of supertitles. As Mladen Dolar succinctly observes, ‘singing is bad communication’Footnote 74 – a characterization that contrasts with cybernetics as the epitome of ‘control and communication’. On the other hand, as the ungainliness of the text-to-speech voice suggests, the history of computational linguistics has been riddled with failure. David Golumbia argues, for instance, that the goal to show that language is computational or to produce a ‘“speaking computer” and/or “universal translator”’ is likely never to succeed.Footnote 75 Still, each form relates to desire: the La Wally aria stages the tragic libidinal excesses of a peasant heroine, while the aria's text-to-speech rendering points to natural language processing's origins in psychotherapy including Joseph Weizenbaum's famous 1960s ELIZA programme.Footnote 76
Z's work addresses these historical intersections not only in the context of opera and experimental music but also as they relate to a posthuman imaginary. Another scene from Voci, which links AI to communications technologies and the acousmatic voice, consists of pre-recorded offstage sound and a video projected as Z segues between two other sections. ‘Voice Activated’ shows the image of a cassette tape-style answering machine – described in the libretto as possessing a ‘Hal [9000]-like blinking red light’ – as Z's colleague, Dan, attempts to leave a message on an answering machine that appears to become increasingly self-aware:
Caller: What? You're there! I thought I was talking to your message machine!
Machine: This IS the message machine.
Caller: But you're responding to me!Footnote 77
‘Voice Activated’ thus re-genders (and re-races) the HAL 9000, while it domesticates the cinematic voice of space-age AI through the fantasy of an Advanced General Intelligence (AGI) agent, seemingly a disembodied (acousmatic) version of Z relegated to home office work. Given Voci's San Francisco premiere and Z's physical proximity to Silicon Valley as a Bay Area resident, there is reason perhaps to compare such a scene to the cultural impact of big tech over the past few decades. In this regard, ‘Voice Activated’ appears prophetic in its anticipation of the proliferation of feminized ‘virtual assistants’ beginning in the early twenty-teens. Apple's Siri, for instance, handles a range of office work and at first spoke only through phones.Footnote 78 Here Z uses techniques of the acousmatic voice to engage a history of the automation of gendered office work and its extension in contemporary fantasies of AI.
Along with AI, phones figure throughout Voci. In ‘That Tone’, Z stages a duet with a physical answering machine, which she uses to sample and loop her voice. ‘That Tone’ figures as a kind of embodied answer to the disembodied acousmatic call placed in ‘Voice Activated’. Both scenes use language and the voice to illuminate gendered aspects of communications technologies. In ‘That Tone’, Z envisions the family as a kind of ‘imagined comm-unity’,Footnote 79 a phrase that refers to the ways communications technologies provide it with both functional conditions and sources of interruption. The notion of ‘tone’ here suggests a short circuit between music (as in vocal tone), technology (as in a ‘beep’), and the maternal: addressing the small answering machine device, which she cradles in one hand, Z struggles to sing a full melodic phrasing of ‘Don't use that tone with me’. She starts with only the beginning of the phrase, uttering the single word, ‘Don't’ – only to be repeatedly interrupted by an impatient child–device, which indicates, following a beep, ‘You have no messages.’
The phone is premised upon notions of sender/receiver and signal/noise, key concepts in information theory.Footnote 80 In ‘Lost Voice’, Z dials an onstage rotary phone to contact the offstage pre-recorded voice of a medical doctor, to whom she indicates, with a harsh and scratchy vocal timbre, ‘I've been really resting my voice’, and ‘I've been doing everything you said but still….’ As the vignette progresses, her voice deteriorates further into a series of noisy squeals and squeaks to which the doctor repeatedly responds, simply, ‘Mm hm. Yeah.’Footnote 81 Here ‘signal’ mirrors the healthy, able-bodied voice, while ‘noise’ stands for its loss of fidelity, its anatomical precarity. In a moment of fiction-turned-reality, Z describes how she lost her voice on the second night of the New York premiere of Voci at The Kitchen. Although her voice did not fully recover in time – during the second night's performance her middle range was impaired – she nevertheless visited a vocal specialist in Manhattan who prescribed steroids to treat her inflamed vocal cords.Footnote 82 Overall, the scene pairs the fleshy contingency of the human voice – and its dependence upon the body's precarious status as sick/well – with the cybernetic paradigm of signal/noise.
In ‘Keitai (Cell Phone Voice)’, Z extends this metaphor of signal/noise by manipulating musical, social, and technological conventions. The scene uses a set of participatory mobile phone activities to playfully invert the expectation that audiences remain seated in silence – a convention that first arose in nineteenth-century Europe, and, though widely adopted, is not universal. During Keitai's first movement, a pre-recorded spoken message, which is also displayed via projected video, instructs a set of audience members to call other audience members whose phone numbers they have been given in advance. Upon receiving a call, each audience member is asked to say in their ‘loudest Cellphone [sic] voice’: ‘I'm sorry I can't talk right now. I'm attending a performance!’Footnote 83 In the second movement the audience members swap positions: senders and receivers exchange roles. Central to Weheliye's notion of Black posthumanism, the mobile phone figures prominently in Black popular music and, as an acousmatic technology of the embodied voice, points further for him to a ‘mechanized desire at the cusp of the human and posthuman’.Footnote 84 Z was inspired by the ubiquity of such devices in 1999 during an art residency in Tokyo, and decided to rework Western music's proscenium structure in favour of a diffuse ensemble of mobile phones composed for her own ‘listening pleasure’ – all while she remained acousmatically hidden from the audience's view.Footnote 85
‘Divas’ returns to Z's meditation on technologically mediated operatic desire. The scene consists of the simultaneous presentation of three different arias – ‘Per pieta’ from Mozart's Così fan tutte, ‘Quando m'en vo’’ from Puccini's La bohème, and ‘Vissi d'arte’ from Puccini's Tosca – sung respectively by three performers: Julie Queen, Amy X Neuburg, and Z. Two of these arias (‘Per pieta’ and ‘Quando m'en vo’’) are pre-recorded, and the performers (Queen and Neuburg) are shown as life-size video projections, each framed from head to foot, which taken together bookend the stage. Meanwhile, Z sings her aria, ‘Vissi d'arte’, live on stage. Although spatially separated and differentiated in terms of live and pre-recorded statuses, the characters portrayed in all three arias are the objects of male desire, a status heightened by Z's reference to the diva, which since the 1820s has invoked the otherworldly power of the female voice implied in the term's earliest meaning as ‘goddess’.Footnote 86
Focusing on the commonalities between the three singing parts, Lewis contends that in ‘Divas’ Z stages a set of ‘sonic multiplicities’, further suggesting that one of the two accompanying videos figures as Z's ‘Doppelgänger’.Footnote 87 Rather than foregrounding similarities between the performances (while also moving beyond the sonic), I want to suggest that Z uses disparities between her performance and her video counterparts in order to reflect on technologies of the embodied voice. Distinct from her digital counterparts, Z sings centre stage, a significant arrangement given her engagements with race and in light of a history of the peripheralization of Black voices in opera. As the only performer among the three who is given fleshly embodiment, furthermore, it is Z's very lack of technological mediation that figures here as an exemplary technique of corporeality.Footnote 88 Along with an expression of the power of the feminine voice, ‘Divas’ enacts a form of what André refers to as ‘downstaging’, which ‘brings Black perspectives and experiences downstage in our narrative of how the story is told and who is telling and interpreting the story’.Footnote 89 In ‘Divas’ – and indeed throughout Voci – Z reclaims the centrality of this narrative, ultimately re-narrating the human.Footnote 90
In sum, Z confronts the posthuman imaginary across an expanded cultural and historical field that is inseparable from ideological constructions of the human. On the one hand, from gendered office work to social reproduction and maternal labour, Z illustrates how liberal humanism's core racializing and gendered functions accompany technoculture from cybernetics to big tech. On the other, Voci reframes opera's inheritances from Florentine humanism through natural language processing, telephony, AI, and other cybernetic technologies. We have approached Z's use of the voice through a critical reconsideration of acousmatics that resonates with Weheliye's notion of the strategically inauthentic voice. As opposed to Schaeffer's evacuation of bodies, desires, and identities, Z reformulates acousmatics as a technique of embodiment that contrasts pure phenomenological reduction with the generation of extra-musical meaning. Specifically, through her historical reinterpretation of opera and technologies of the embodied voice, she gestures toward alternatives to humanism's human and its technological reflection in the posthuman. Pointing further to the complex registers across which gender and race are constructed, Z suggests that although we have never been fully human or posthuman, we may nevertheless narrate new versions of each.
