Call for Papers, No. 44, October 2027

LIMINAL VOCALITY: Voicing Beyond the Human

The Editorial Board of AM Journal of Art and Media Studies (ISSN 2217-9666 and ISSN 2406-1654) invites scholars to submit original contributions for a special thematic issue on liminal vocality.

The guest editor of this issue will be Jelena Novak, CESEM, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.

The aim of the issue is to explore what happens when the voice no longer belongs securely to the body, the human, or even to sound? We invite contributions that discuss liminal vocality: voices and vocal practices that emerge at the boundaries between bodies, media, technologies, species, environments, and forms of perception. Rather than treating the posthuman voice as a stable category, it approaches vocality as a condition of transition, transformation, displacement and becoming.

The voice has long been understood as one of the most intimate signs of human presence. To have a voice is to speak, to sing, to express an identity, to be recognized, and, in a broader political sense, to have a say. Yet the voice has also persistently exceeded the body that appears to produce it. It can be recorded, amplified, transmitted, mediated, displaced, reproduced, transformed, synthesized, detached from its apparent source, or redistributed among bodies and technologies. The voice is therefore never entirely contained by the speaking or singing body. Its very elusiveness unsettles the assumption that voice can be securely located in a body or captured in a particular time and place. The voice may be human and more-than-human, embodied and technological, sonic and atmospheric, individual and distributed.

The notion of liminality allows to understand vocality across these shifting boundaries, without assuming that the human and the posthuman constitute two separate and opposing categories. Liminal vocality may instead designate a voice in between: between body and technology, sound and materiality, presence and absence, human and nonhuman, individual and collective, singer and environment. It may be acousmatic or embodied, synthetic or organic, live or recorded, intentional or involuntary. It may emerge from a singer, a machine, an animal, an algorithm, an atmosphere, an object, or from an assemblage in which such distinctions become difficult to sustain.

Recent approaches to voice have further challenged its reduction to audible communication. Martin Daughtry's formulation of a “posthuman, post-sonorous conception of voice” proposes vocality as an atmospheric and environmental process rather than simply purposeful sound issuing from a human throat. In this account, voice participates in exchanges of air, material, duration and environment, producing forms of connection that exceed the autonomous individual. Zeynep Bulut's recent work similarly understands voice through its plasticity, its multisensory and collective dimensions, and through forms of non-dialogue that distribute interaction across human and nonhuman bodies. Such approaches invite us to reconsider not only who has a voice, but where a voice takes place.

In contemporary opera and music theatre, these questions have become particularly productive. Holograms, robots, Vocaloids, electronically transformed singers, virtual performers and other songful machines unsettle the relationship between vocal agency and the human body. They raise questions not only about representation, but about the ontology of singing itself: who, or what, can sing?

Nicholas David Stevens extends this problem to another scale, asking how opera might give voice to entities too vast for human perception. His analysis of planetary and hyperobject vocality suggests that the more-than-human voice may not simply belong to an alternative character, but may emerge through the collapse of distinctions between character and setting, voice and environment, human and planetary processes.

Liminal Vocality: Voicing Beyond the Human seeks contributions that investigate voice as a relational, material and mediated event. The focus is on vocality as something that moves across thresholds and unsettles established distinctions: between the audible and the tactile, the embodied and the disembodied, the human and the nonhuman, the individual and the distributed, the organic and the technological. At stake, ultimately, is not simply the question of whose voice we hear, but what happens to our understanding of voice when its boundaries begin to dissolve.

Thematic Areas

Submissions are particularly encouraged around the following themes, while contributions addressing related issues are also welcome.

1. Voice at the Threshold: Liminal Vocality

What does it mean to understand vocality as inherently liminal? How does the voice inhabit spaces between presence and absence, inside and outside, self and other? Possible topics include:

• voice, liminality and embodiment
• voice as becoming, transformation and transition
• acousmatic and disembodied voices
• voice/body disjunction and ventriloquism
• spectral, uncanny and unstable voices
• voice as boundary, interface or threshold
• vocal identity and the instability of the speaking/singing subject

2. Mediated Voices and Plastic Vocality

Technologies do not merely transmit voices: they can transform their materiality, agency and perceptual conditions. What happens when the voice is recorded, amplified, processed, cloned, synthesized, visualized or rendered tactile? Possible approaches include:

• voice and recording technologies
• electronic and digital vocal processing
• voice cloning and synthetic speech
• AI and algorithmic vocality
• virtual and immersive vocal environments
• reinventing the voice in film, television, video and installation
• tactile and multisensory vocality
• mediation, materiality and the plasticity of voice
• voice-as-skin and the interface between body and technology

3. Beyond Sound: Atmospheric, Material and Distributed Voices

If voice is more than sound, what other forms can vocality take? What happens when breathing, vibration, air, matter, touch and environment are repositioned in the vocal event? We welcome contributions on:

• atmospheric, vibrational, magnetic and multisensory vocality
• breath, air and respiration
• voice beyond the ear
• environmental and ecological voices
• material and non-sonorous vocal practices
• distributed selves and collective vocality
• voice, pollution and atmospheric politics

4. Planetary, Environmental and More-than-Human Vocalities

How might vocality operate at scales beyond the individual body? Can an environment, ecosystem, object or planetary entity be understood as vocal? Possible topics include:

• planetary voices and hyperobjects
• ecological and climate vocalities
• opera and the more-than-human environment
• objects, infrastructures and machinic vocality
• interspecies vocal relations
• voice, landscape and environment

5. Singing Beyond the Human

Who, or what, can sing? How does singing change when its apparent source is no longer an exclusively human body? Contributions might address:

• singing machines, robots and mechanical vocality
• vocaloids and virtual singers
• holographic and avatar performers
• animal and interspecies vocalities
• monstrous, cyborg and hybrid voices
• synthetic and artificial voices
• posthuman and more-than-human singing
• the politics of who or what is permitted to become a vocal subject

6. Opera, Music Theatre and the Liminal Voice

Opera has historically invested extraordinary cultural and aesthetic power in the singing human body. Yet contemporary opera and music theatre repeatedly disrupt the relationship between singer, voice, character and body. We invite contributions addressing:

• contemporary opera and posthuman vocality
• music theatre and mediated voice
• opera beyond the singing body
• the dramaturgy of disembodied and distributed voices
• voice and moving image
• live/recorded and human/machine performance
• experimental vocal practices
• new forms of vocal agency, authorship and spectatorship

Potential contributors are invited to submit full-text proposals formatted according to the Journal's stylistic guidelines, by April 30, 2027, at the latest. Stylistic Guidelines can be found here.

Please send your full-text submissions and queries (if any) by email to both the issue editor Dr. Jelena Novak (jnovak@fcsh.unl.pt) and the Journal email address (amjournal@outlook.com).

AM Journal is organized into four sections: Main Theme, Beyond the Main Theme, Artist Portfolio, and Book Reviews. Only the first section, which is also the central one, is predefined by the issue's main theme.

The issue is scheduled for publication in October 2027.

Please note: Following the journal categorization of the Ministry of Science, Technological Development, and Innovation of the Republic of Serbia, only original scholarly articles that adhere to the highest academic standards are accepted for submission. Upon submission, the Editorial Team performs an initial screening and selection of manuscripts, subsequently forwarding the chosen submissions for double-blind peer review. The ultimate decision regarding the acceptance of a manuscript is contingent upon the outcomes of the peer review process.

We look forward to receiving your submission proposals!

Guest issue editor

Jelena Novak

Center for Music Studies (CESEM), Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal

 

Jelena Novak is a tenured researcher at the Center for Music Studies (CESEM), Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal. Her fields of interest include modern and contemporary music, recent opera, singing and new media, capitalist realism, voice studies, and feminine identities in music. Exploring these fields, she works as a researcher, lecturer, dramaturge, music critic, editor, and curator focused on bringing together critical theory and contemporary art. Her books include Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body (2015), Operofilia (2018) and Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama (co-edited with John Richardson, 2019). Currently, she is working on the book Liminal Singing: Opera in the Expanded Field and researching what it means and what it takes to sing beyond human, a topic she explores in her recent text “Posthuman Voice Beyond Opera: Songful Practice of Holograms, Robots, Machines, and Vocaloids” (Contemporary Opera in Flux ed. by Y.U. Everett, 2024).