Emily Wilbourne, “Impersonation and the Voice”

The Department of Musicology hosts a talk by guest scholar Emily Wilbourne (CUNY Queen’s college and Graduate Center); free and open to the public.

Wilbourne describes her presentation:

“In Western culture, the voice plays an overdetermined role in the literal and metaphorical representation of personhood. We find our voice, raise our voice, recognize each other by the sounds of our voices, and – through the democratic process – we hear the voice of the people. In this paper, I am interested in voices that are misrecognized or misheard: voices that through illness, medical treatment, or training, confound expectations in ways that foreground the sonic materiality of the voice and its relationship to cultural expectations.”