Voicing Otherwise: Archival Vocality//Unsettling the Listening Body

Abstract

Voice has typically been understood as an external representation of an internal uniqueness or individuality, often at the expense of the recognition of its always already relational, multi-sensory, and multi-sitedness. This project engages with the interdisciplinary and critical study of voice, the archival and epistemic violences that have been enacted around it, and the ways in which it opens resistive and unsettling possibilities otherwise. I ask, how does listening, to past and present, to archives and voices, offer new and unsettling modes of relating to the world?. Through this exploration, I intend to illuminate the radical potential of listening differently, and offer openings towards an anti-colonial listening practice. To do this, I engage a critique of Alan Lomax’s “Cantometrics,” a vocal/musical classification system for global music, positioning it as an example of colonial listening practice. I then turn towards the music of Wolastoqiyik singer Jeremy Dutcher, and their reimagining of archival Wolastoqey language songs and recordings. I position Dutcher’s music as a “voicing otherwise” that encourages listening differently. Additionally, in an effort to unsettle the ways that we write about and through music and sound, I explore various multisensory and performative writing practices, inviting the reader to listen differently through the form and structure of the written project. Voice and listening have the potential to become critically engaged elements of experience in a deeply liberating sense. My hope is that this project will contribute to such a widened conception of voice, particularly in the context of monumental reckoning and unsettling colonialisms.