Here Me Speak. Who Am I?

Hear Me Speak. Who Am I?: An Investigation of Voice and Power Voice is pervasive and omnipresent. Through the voice, we navigate and understand our interdependent social and political power relations. My voice, your voice, her voice, and his voice all perform a socially constructed hierarchical role, mediating our identity within society. The knowledge we gain from sonic experience frames a set of relations between our acoustic environment, its participants, and their politicized relations to one another. In Hear Me Speak. Who Am I? we explore the voice as an acousmatic sound (Schafer, 1994) and the power relations surrounding vocal performance (Carson, 1992). In “The Gender of Sound”, Carson argues that through the voice people become agents of their own subjugation or empowerment. We investigate the voice as a constantly shifting relational sonic element that relays social and political power, as well as the voice’s inherent semantic elements which convey and tie the voice to an individual's social position, history, and power relations (Sterne, February 19). The voice is a sonic element that has been constructed, performed, and reconstructed to fit into specific interactions that help us categorize and bring meaning and understanding to our social landscape through the sound field available to us. As Dolar notes, how one talks positions themselves in society within a set of socially constructed power relations (Dolar, 2006). When one is conscious of performing their voice, it alters the outcome (Sterne, February 19). We found this to be true in our recording session, as our participants were hyper-aware of their voice being captured. For example, we discovered that the majority of women in our study implemented vocal fry. As we discussed in Jonathan Sterne’s lecture on “Gender and Voice”, women often use vocal fry to assert their agency when interacting with others (Sterne, February 5). The voice’s sonic production is a major axis where power is constructed, maintained, and performed and it is constantly contingent to one’s own social position. Voice perception often becomes subconsciously translated into social hierarchies thus impacting how we hear others and ingrain perceptual biases. Our piece, Hear Me Speak: Who Am I, acts as a mode of political engagement and confronts the viewer through destabilizing these biases. Works Cited