Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media ed. by Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson, and Theo van Leeuwen, and: Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century by Andrew M. Kimbrough (review)

The study of the voice has been on the rise in the academy as the focus of a slew of books, articles, and conference panels. These two books are among the latest that will be of interest to anyone studying voice in performance studies. Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media is an edited collection of essays that take up the voice in the context of digital culture. Norie Neumark opens with an introduction that presents the voice as fundamentally paradoxical. Though issuing from the body, vocal sounds are neither simply embodied nor disembodied, always acting in excess of the body. Neumark identifies the flawed tendency of sound studies to discuss the technologically mediated voice as only disembodied and offers this anthology as a step toward redirecting the conversation to include the embodied nature of the mediated voice—a task at which the volume is most successful.

The book is divided into four parts. The first, Capturing Voice, concentrates on the technological mediation of the human voice in recording and distribution. Theo van Leeuwen contributes a chapter comparing the vox humana stops on a pre-digital organ to the voice sounds of the Roland RD300-SX keyboard. Thomas Y. Levin chronicles a concise history of voice mail before the development in the early 1990s of the answering machine. Levin’s contribution is an exemplary demonstration of Lewis Mumford’s thesis, cited in the book’s preface, that “‘cultural preparation’ precedes technological innovation” (ix). The first section also contains essays by Virginia Madsen and John Potts on podcasting and by Martin Thomas on revisiting half-century-old ethnographic recordings of an aboriginal tribe in Australia, with current living tribe members. One of the most exciting features of the volume is an intermixing of scholarly articles with first-person descriptive and performative writing. Theresa M. Senft’s piece in the first section makes up for mis-characterizing Alvin Lucier’s 1970 I Am Sitting in a Room as “a dreadful technical exercise in 1980s sound art” (67) with a fascinating description of being a female consumer of phone sex and using Lucier’s groundbreaking piece to examine affective economies of intimacy, space, and sound.

The second section is devoted to performativity and the performing body. It opens with another essay by Neumark, this one focused on the philosophical concept of performativity and spanning a divergent set of vocal examples from machinima to Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s Listening Post (2001), from which she proposes the useful insight that the pre-digital “authenticity effect” (114) of the voice can be seen as performative in examples of digital art. The subsequent exceptional essays by Meredith Morse on the dancer’s voice, focusing on works by Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, and Brandon LaBelle on sound poetry expertly theorize and elucidate the voice’s unique (for the most part silent) context in dance and the changing technological landscape of poetry and orality. The section is rounded out with a piece of performative writing from Mark Amerika and an insightful essay by artist Amanda Stewart about the vocal discoveries she has made by interacting with technology—displaying the substantial benefits of performance as research and the knowledge gained by doing.

Section three focuses on mainstream media with substantial contributions about video and computer games, a tremendous but relatively untouched subject in the academy. Isabelle Arvers contributes an article on machinima; Mark Ward explores the voice in videogames in terms of immersion, focusing on the first-person shooter BioShock; and Axel Stockburger further theorizes the voice of the avatar as a “suture of the player into the fictional game universe...