The voice lessons

Abstract

In this text I invite you to join me in a series of voice lessons, where I shares stories from my embodied experiences as a soprano, teacher, and researcher in the Western sociocultural context of singing. If you are expecting a traditional voice lesson, of ‘How to sing, 1, 2, 3’ you might be disappointed. But, if you are interested in how voicing (auto)ethnographies might be one way of producing, analyzing, and representing voice, I will happily dive into the voice lessons with you. For me, writing stories has become a way of knowing as a researcher, as through my writing I was able to discover new perspectives of voice – ultimately allowing me space to rethink notions of voice. Through the voice lessons I show how I zigzag through the worlds of the material voice and theoretical-philosophical-‘academic’ voice, guided by new materialism and performative autoethnography. My voice lessons can be seen as a performative utterance, which rests on the belief in the embodiment and the materiality of the writing body, an open-ended way of (re)thinking voice. Voice lessons for singing voices and academic voices.