Sound Technologies as Agency-Granting
Prosthesis to Vocal Body

ABSTRACTK r i st i n a W arr e nWestern voice is historically de-agentialized, that is, gendered female,
opposed to performer self-listening, de-privileged relative to composition
and rendered ocularcentric by recording technologies. However, byemploying sound technologies as prosthesis to the vocal body, and by
self-listening to manage the body-prosthesis relationship, contemporary
extended voice practitioners figure as cyborgs reclaiming vocal agency,that is, input into mediation of and by one’s technologized vocal body.

Recording and editing techniques have played a keyrole in vocal music. The fact that with a tape recorder
it is possible to record a sound or sounds, isolate themfrom the original context, modify them and combine
them with other sound elements from other contexts,
has put the musician (and the singer) in a condition tolisten differently to reality and to all those sound events
that normally escape us because they are absorbed
and masked by the action that produces them and theexperience that causes them.
–Cathy Berberian [1]The voice has historically been situated at cross-purposeswith performer self-listening. Bel canto pedagogy construes
vocalist self-listening as embodied feeling [2]. Similar ideals underpin vocal idioms around the world, from Koreanp’ansori to digitized Eastern European folk music [3,4]. Although many musicians may aspire to feeling rather thanintellectualizing the music, this transidiomatic insistencethat vocal music in particular cultivate a felt body is partand parcel of the historical and agency-erasing association
between voice, nature, woman and inarticulacy [5–7]. Deagentialization also results from the de-privileging of voice
relative to composition and technology in Western music.
For instance, recent projects to reclaim vocalist Cathy Ber­
Kristina Warren (composer, educator), Multimedia & Electronic Music
Experiments (MEME), Department of Music, Brown University, U.S.A.
Email: <kristina_warren@brown.edu>.
See <mitpressjournals.org/toc/lmj/-/28> for supplemental files associated withthis issue.

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LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 28, pp. 30–33, 2018berian for the twentieth-century experimental canon do soby reframing her as a composer [8]. And although the pairingof voice and recording technologies has paradigm-shifting
potential, as Berberian incisively described in 1966, this potential has been overshadowed by “disembodiment.” “Disembodied voice” masquerades as a benign technical term but
is in fact a reification of extant patriarchal understandingsof voice.
Practitioners of extended voice, by contrast, use soundtechnologies (e.g. loops, delays, granulation, precomposed
samples, pitch shifting, filtering and spectral modifications ofvoice, along with analog and digital synthesis) as a prosthesis
to the vocal body. Precisely because voice has failed to incorporate cyborg theory’s notions of subjective, technologizedembodiment, sound technologies prosthetically stand in forsuch embodiment. Essential to the complex performative acts
of extended voice (i.e. vocalizing, recording voice, processing
voice and managing total sound output), the embodied actof self-listening accomplishes the integration of vocal bodyand technological prosthesis into a new cyborg whole. Worksby extended voice practitioners Marie Guilleray and Maja
Ratkje are prime examples. Guilleray uses sound technologies in short gestures to repeatedly and pointillistically articulate the cyborg body, while Ratkje deploys the electronic
prosthesis glacially (slowly and on a large scale), temporallyemphasizing cyborg memory and stamina.
Recorded Voice and Disembodiment

Across disciplines, Western writers very frequently use “disembodied voice” to mean “recorded voice,” or sometimes“synthesized voice.” Yet whereas “recorded voice” is a precise technical term in sound practice, “disembodied voice” isinstead a crystallization of several patriarchal subtexts. First,
this common use of “disembodied voice” simply means that
there is audible voice but no visible body. Describing recorded
voice as “disembodied” suggests that the invisible body issimply gone, which in turn ignores the corporeal labor of vocalizing and betrays an ocularcentric assumption that bodies
are best or only apprehended through vision, not audition.

doi:10.1162/LMJ_a_01039 ©2018 ISASTSecond, the varying stakes of so-called vocal disembodiment
reinforce patriarchal structures of privilege and oppression.
A “disembodied” male voice, for instance, represents “authority, expertise, and reason” [9], while a female such voice resembles “a scuttling rat . . . an intruder . . . a zoo animal” [10].
Although sound artists and computer musicians do sometimes use “disembodied” to describe recorded instrumentsor telematic performance, “disembodied voice” in particular betrays a patriarchal anxiety that, if invisible, the vocalist
may not be properly engaging with (i.e. feeling) their own
sound. Alexander Weheliye writes that “the recorded voice incontemporary mainstream R&B . . . reconstruct[s] the black
voice in relation to information technologies” [11], an important step because Black people were previously excluded
from positions of vocal-technological power. Arguing that“perceived vocal gender is the primary generator of meaningin listening to voices,” Lucie Vágnerová suggests that Wendy
Carlos’s work with vocoders is subversive particularly because it disrupts gender [12]. In other words, the negative
valence of “disembodied voice” stems from the fact that when
voice is recorded or otherwise technologized, corporeal Otherness becomes invisible and the vocalist’s felt engagementwith their own sound disappears.
Conversely, artists and scholars have fundamentally reevaluated “embodiment” in recent years, although not usually with respect to voice [13]. Works by performance andmultimedia artists increasingly treat body as both medium
and frame. Embodiment is a subjective way of being a body,
including the ability to break or question the body [14].
However, if recorded voice equals disembodied voice—if vocal body owes its very existence to being seen by theviewer—then the vocalist never truly experiences that subjective, mediated embodiment as theorized by cyborg art
and scholarship. Given that the conversation around vocal
embodiment has not kept pace with the larger conversation
around embodiment, extended voice practitioners’ use ofsound technologies is especially subversive.
Agency, Cyborg, Prosthesis

Voice is historically de-agentialized: gendered female, opposed to self-listening and, more recently, made ocularcentric by recording technologies. (I note here that marginalized
persons in general can and do have agency, although with
substantial opposition from patriarchal, white supremacist,ableist and similar structures.) Recording technologies’ early
and ongoing colonization of voice has inscribed the history
and present of mediatized voice with patriarchal power dynamics, retarding the evolution of vocal agency even as cyborg agency came of age in the posthuman era.
Relevant themes from cyborg theory include: blurring of
public-private distinctions, destabilization of “authorship,”and fragmentation and reevaluation of body normativity [15–17]. But these insights have not fully resonated with scholarly and creative approaches to vocal agency. For disability
theorist Laurie Stras, the mid-twentieth-century coincidenceof microphone refinement and crooning popularization was
pointedly not a result of individual vocalists’ agency (e.g.

Louis Armstrong, Connee Boswell) [18]. Vocal teacher andpractitioner Diana Looser describes agency in Laurie Anderson’s work as, ultimately, the power of conferring the
microphone to other performance personae, i.e. working astechnologist [19]. Other writers equate authorial, compositional and technological work in vocal music [20]. Whilecyborg theory may view the microphone itself as an agencygranting prosthesis to the vocal body, too often vocalists are
excluded from technical decisions around microphone use,
and are instructed instead, “Don’t worry about it; just feelthe music.” The division of vocal and technological labor—
indeed, the vanishingly narrow range of acceptable actions
by the vocal body—reinforces the vocal listening prohibitionand deprives vocalists of input into their own cyborg status.
Thus, although “cyborg” is now a mainstay of both academic and popular culture, vocal agency remains in a stateof arrested development. I take it as axiomatic that voice
today is both mediated—nearly always heard digitized, often performatively referring to technology—and corporeal,
and both in complex, fluid ways. Yet vocalists are still rarely
thought of as using technology to interrogate body [21]. Thus,
I optimistically define contemporary vocal agency as “input
into how one’s own technologized vocal body mediates andis mediated.”
Extended voice practitioners demonstrate agency by employing sound technologies as prosthesis to the vocal body,specifically replacing the embodied-technologized subjectivity typically denied vocalists. My use of “prosthesis” lies
somewhere between that of media theorists (prosthesis as
metaphorical extension) and disability theorists (prosthesis as importantly material but often paired with individual
social experience and class profile) [22,23]. Through soundtechnologies, extended voice practitioners subvert the deagentialization keeping vocalists from influencing mediationof and by their bodies. Electronic prosthesis in extended
voice bears some resemblance to literary understandingsof prosthesis. Narrative use of the disabled body “allow[s]authors the metaphorical ‘play’ between macro and micro
registers of meaning-making” [24]. Similarly, the text can
indicate itself as prosthesis, yearning for the “personating
subjectivity” of the photographic medium or the writerly
body [25]. In extended voice practice, self-listening effects
the cyborg symbiosis between electronic prosthesis and vocal body, fundamentally recasting the cultural and materialbounds of the body.
Embodied Gestural Decay

French artist Marie Guilleray, based in the Netherlands,
expertly uses audio technologies to create space and imbue each vocal sound with a subtle temporal profile. Her
minimal setup—laptop and microphone and sometimes her
novel glove controller—achieves a vast range of sounds. This
streamlined approach to the electronic prosthesis draws attention to the temporal interplay between vocalizing andcontrolling and to the timbral unification among varying
cyborg sounds.
Guilleray’s solo work Entre chien et loup (voice, tape, live

Warren, Sound Technologies as Agency-Granting Prosthesis to Vocal Body

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electronics) [26] is a deconstruction of musical communication. Formal sections, which are often introduced by a struck
metal sound and/or a recording of crickets, emphasize either
intervallic or percussive content—possibly an interpretationof vocal vowels versus consonants. Throughout, live and precomposed sounds are artfully indistinguishable. The precise
application of temporal audio methods to the live vocal signal(e.g. delaying enveloped bits of sound of varying lengths, creating a morphing collage) digitizes the vocal body and thus
articulates the cyborg. In a departure from previous sounds,
the last minute of the piece contains ingressive and egressive breathing through cavernous embouchure, paralleled bycontinuous salivated lines. This particular cyborg manifestation recalls Berberian’s reference to frequent gestural “masking” of sonic nuances [27]. Although the cavernous mouth ismysteriously evocative, possibly suggesting evil or injury, thejuxtaposition with noisy, quasi-medical saliva sounds situates
this squarely in the cyborg realm. The edges of body fray, and
it is corporeal-technological interaction, rather than inferred
emotional content, that comes to the fore.
Après la mer (voice, live electronics) is an improvisation
with frequent collaborator Johan van Kreij [28]. Guillerayapplies delay and transposition to her initial sung glissandi.
At about 1:15 the voice becomes more cloud-like, with distant,reverberant delayed singing about a fifth higher than the initial material. Whereas higher vocal pitch often correlates withlouder volume, Guilleray digitally inverts this relationship:
The higher pitches are more distant and spacious. The ascentcontinues, with squeaked-sung pitches (approximately B5)
treated with chorusing and delay. Guilleray’s cyborg breaks
the ascent through granulation, or clustering of recorded vocal bits, which prominently signals digitization. Later, frequency modifications replace temporal work; for instance,a midrange sung line (vowels i and a) becomes graduallymore digitized as a vocoder adds harmony. Overall, this piece
consists of repeated short sonic evolutions from the acoustic
to the electronic. Repeating this progression underscores thesubtle performative and gestural abilities of the cyborg body.
Glacial Prosthetic Motion

Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje of Norway makes music characterized by gradually evolving, and occasionally leaping,cyborg sound. Ratkje uses a relatively large setup, often including laptop, microphone, controllers, analog synthesizers and mixer. Ratkje undertakes complex choreography tomanage this wide range of equipment and sound, engaging
most frequently with her in-mouth and handheld controllers.
Her exploratory cyborg complicates the temporal boundaries
of vocal gesture.
Ratkje’s voice-electronics set at the 2013 Punkt Festival
exemplifies her solo work [29]. In contrast to the relative
stasis of the first 30 minutes, the final 10 minutes are mobile
and serve to overlap vocal and analog sound. Removal of
the looped A quarter-sharp sung u vowel (32:16) marks thestart of this final section. High frequencies, from a looped
finger cymbal sample and an analog oscillator, initially seem
crucial. But Ratkje soon doubles back, introducing a new
midrange sung vocal melody, while pulsing synthesized
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Warren, Sound Technologies as Agency-Granting Prosthesis to Vocal Bodylines follow below. The vocal melody soon reaches its local
maximum (39:40). The pulsing synth vies for attention, thenreduces to a low, ominously mixed buzz, a transition covered
by delayed saliva sounds. In the last two minutes, there is an
ambiguous resolution as the music moves from the previous
minor to a related major key; finally, the electronics drop out
and Ratkje ends the set by singing “sa” on the upper tonic,
B5. The steady, looped texture of the first 30 minutes is an
integral preface to the high activity level of the last quarterof the set, in which analog oscillators initially parallel thevoice and eventually conflict with it. All of this composes acomplex manifestation of cyborg sound.
In the album Rasaka [30], a collaboration with jazz trio
Säkä, Ratkje employs two primary techniques: nonexact
loops (mostly sampling unpitched noisy sound—for instance, saliva, consonants or hisses) and processed live vocal
signal (either speech/yelling or nonlaryngeal pitched material such as inhaled squeaks). Ratkje’s controller mapped toa Csound patch likely effects the detailed, nonexact loops,
while bussing to distortion pedals permits real-time control
of processing on the live voice. Another key technique is improvisation with nonsignifying, often rapid clusters of phonemes, such as “gada-gada-ga.” However, Ratkje thoughtfully
deploys her cyborg status here, looping noisy hisses together
with “gada” phonemes to undercut the traditional associations between speech, intimacy and the present. Live andsampled sounds ultimately become indistinguishable. Ratkje
uses the electronic prosthesis to sustain and develop the ensemble sound, a complex interaction fundamentally enabled
by self-listening.
Globalizing the Prosthesis

Extended voice practitioners are equally fluent in recorded
media and live performance. Thus, future work should delve
more deeply into the spectrum between liveness and recording in extended voice practice. The notion of onstage record­
ivity will be a fruitful starting point. Moreover, larger culturalissues underpin the reception of intermedial extensions ofvoice. Due to the traditional Western associations between
voice, Other, nature and inarticulacy, agential commentaryon one’s own voice is often dismissed as mere noise or ugliness. Extended voice uses sound technologies to redefine
voice as a fundamentally agential instrument and will needto keep making this case in order to normalize the sound of
agential female voice.
Perhaps the largest questions at stake here concern ontology of the vocal body. In their exploration of timbre andtemporality, extended voice practitioners seem to reject any
need for vocal sound to read as vocal. I consider this timbral exploration central to extended voice, and future work
must account for body normativity itself, including issuesof disability. Berberian’s prescient 1966 statement [31] is a
useful guide: Recording and other sound technologies allow
us to listen differently to various realities, including voice’s
de-agentialized history, along with its cyborg and anti-ableist
potentials. Future vocal theory must acknowledge the troubled history of voice but must also encourage technologicalengagement affirming a vast range of bodies.

Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Rachel Devorah for her invaluable feedback on thismanuscript.

18 Laurie Stras, “The Organ of the Soul: Voice, Damage, and Affect,”in Neil Lerner and Joseph N. Straus, eds., Sounding Off: Theorizing
Disability in Music (New York and London: Routledge, 2006) pp.
173–184.

References and Notes

19 Diana M.F. Looser, “Freeing the Natural Voice? Performance, Gender, Society” (MA thesis, University of Canterbury, 2005).

1 Cathy Berberian, “La nuova vocalità nell’opera contemporanea,”
Discoteca 62 (1966) pp. 34–35 [author’s translation].
2 Paul Madaule, “Listening and Singing,” Journal of Singing of the National Association of Teachers of Singing 57, No. 5, 15–20 (May 2001).
3 Chan E. Park, Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of
Korean Story Singing (Honolulu, HI: Univ. of Hawai’i Press, 2003).
4 Girilal Baars, “Ballads and Ohms: Vocal Traditions, Electronics andCompositional Strategies” (PhD dissertation, University of Hudders­
field, 2015) p. 52.
5	Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy ofVocal Expression (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005).
6	Hannah Bosma, “The Electronic Cry: Voice and Gender in Electroacoustic Music” (PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2013).
7 Theda Weber-Lucks, “Electroacoustic Voices in Vocal Performance
Art—A Gender Issue?” Organised Sound 8, No. 1, 61–69 (2003).
8 Pamela Karantonis et al., eds., Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2014).
9 Mark Pedelty and Morgan Kuecker, “Seen to Be Heard? Gender,
Voice, and Body in Television Advertisements,” Communication andCritical/Cultural Studies 11, No. 3, 250–269 (2014).
10 “Review: Stine Janvin Motland—In Labour,” Attn:Magazine [online](04 May 2014) <www.attnmagazine.co.uk/music/8120> (accessed 28
October 2017).
11	Alexander Weheliye, “ ‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary
Black Popular Music,” Social Text 20, No. 2, 21–47 (2002).
12 Lucie Vágnerová, “Sirens/Cyborgs: Sound Technologies and the Musical Body” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2016) p. 134.
13 Steven Connor, who has written extensively on voice, concludes that
there is no such thing as disembodied voice, mainly because theaudience always tries to visually imagine the vocal body or reconcile
sound and image. Again, vision is the primary sense at play.
14 Bernadette Wegenstein, Getting under the Skin: The Body and Media
Theory (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 2006).
15	Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg
Women (Durham, NC, and London: Duke Univ. Press, 1996).
16	N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago and London: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1999).
17 Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/TechnologicalIntersections in Multimedia Performance (London: Palgrave Mac­
Millan, 2011).

20	Alexa Lauren Woloshyn, “The Recorded Voice and the MediatedBody in Contemporary Canadian Electroacoustic Music” (PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2012).
21 Possible exceptions include: Diane Hughes, “Technologized andAutonomized Vocals in Contemporary Popular Musics,” Journal ofMusic, Technology & Education 8, No. 2, 163–182 (2015), and Robin
James, “ ‘Robo-Diva R&B’: Aesthetics, Politics, and Black Female
Robots in Contemporary Popular Music,” Journal of Popular Music
Studies 20, No. 4, 402–423 (2008).
22 Mara Mills, “Media and Prosthesis: The Vocoder, the Artificial Larynx, and the History of Signal Processing,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 21, No. 1, 107–149 (Fall/Winter 2012).
23	Elizabeth Barnes, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2016).
24 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, “Narrative Prosthesis andthe Materiality of Metaphor: Literature and the Undisciplined Body
of Disability,” in Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies
of Discourse (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000) p. 62.
25 Maurice Wallace, “Print, Prosthesis, (Im)Personation: Morrison’s
Jazz and the Limits of Literary History,” American Literary History
20, No. 4, 794–806 (2008).
26 Marie Guilleray, “Entre chien et loup.” November 2012 <www.marie
guilleray.com/music.html>.
27 Berberian [1].
28 Marie Guilleray with Johan van Kreij, “Après la mer.” October 2014<www.marieguilleray.com/music.html>.
29 Maja Ratkje, “Maja S. K. Ratkje live at the Punkt festival 2013” <www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VDc0ac6PLg&t=1823s>.
30 Saka with Maja Ratkje, Rasaka. 2016. KBA Records, KBA002.
31 Berberian [1].
Manuscript received 30 October 2017.

Kristina Warren is a musician and researcher whose
work—from creating and performing with unique analog/
digital instruments to composing for/with chamber ensembles—addresses individual and collective acts of listening andmaking noise. Currently a visiting assistant professor of electronic music & multimedia at Brown University, she holds a
PhD in composition & computer technologies from the University of Virginia.

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