Routledge Voice Studies

Voice is everywhere. It is a medium of interpersonal communication, central to technology, and a touchstone in discussions of identity, psychological development, and language acquisition. It offers aesthetic pleasure through the arts, acts as a metaphor for authorial, feminist or subaltern voices, and is used as an umbrella term in politics, activism and religion as “the voice the people” is heard or silenced. Non-human, posthuman and more-than-human voices invite us to listen to animal voices, interactive voice recognition systems, and vocal synthesis effected in robotics labs. How do we account for these many versions, or ideas, about voice? How can something so transient and complex be discussed from a scholarly perspective? How might we move beyond established concepts of the voice?

The Routledge Voice Studies series offers an exciting platform to interrogate these questions. Understanding voice studies as a shifting landscape of questions and concerns, this series builds on current initiatives, seeking to expand and capitalise on the productive debates taking place in the areas of music, theatre, and performance studies, as well as cultural studies, ethnomusicology, sound studies, movement and somatics, disability and dysfluency studies, acoustics and acoustemology. Of equal interest are discussions happening in psychology, fine art, poetics and orality studies, linguistics, media and film studies, robotics and artificial intelligence, history and philosophy, translation and adaptation studies, among others.

To that end, we are delighted to include a variety of formats in the series. We are equally interested in monographs, themed edited collections, student-focused anthologies and sourcebooks, revised and expanded editions of classic texts, and inter-medial and multimedial outputs. These varied structures are addressed to both practitioners and scholars as contributors, and are intended for a readership including established and emergent researchers, students and artists in the rich and provocative area of interdisciplinary voice studies.

This website is designed to host audiovisual material that accompanies and complements the writing presented in the books. Acknowledging the sounding of voice and documentation of vocal praxis as integral to voice-centred research, it is intended to foster a multimodal engagement with vocality. It offers free access to a range of video and audio examples in the hope that it will become an open and ever-growing resource for our readers: students, pedagogues, fellow artists and researchers, and anyone interested in exploring voice.

We hope you enjoy this fascinating journey with us.

Series editors: Dr Konstantinos Thomaidis and Dr Ben Macpherson