Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:34:54am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Queer Voices/Queer Narratives Session Chair: Jacob Kopcienski | |
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After Vocal Uniqueness: Trans Vocal Practice and Listening for Discontinuity Harper College This paper develops a critical intervention in sound studies by engaging scholarship following Adriana Cavarero that frames the voice as the sonic guarantee of singularity and embodied uniqueness. While this tradition has been generative, it often relies on an assumption of a coherent, self-identical subject whose voice transparently manifests personhood. Trans vocality complicates this model. Trans lives are frequently articulated through experiences of discontinuity, in which present selfhood is not seamlessly aligned with a past embodiment. Identity emerges through both continuity and rupture. The voice is a particularly charged site for this tension, as many trans women who have otherwise reshaped their bodies to navigate gendered social space encounter the voice as less pliable, carrying audible residues of a self they no longer inhabit. Drawing from trans music-making across experimental vocal practice, punk, and hyper-pop, this paper examines how trans vocalists unsettle the optimism that often surrounds the voice in sound studies. Trans vocal practice is not a unified aesthetic or political project; it encompasses divergent stylistic traditions and ideological commitments. Yet across these differences, trans voices frequently stage a split between identity and embodiment that challenges the assumption that a voice belongs cleanly to a stable subject. Rather than functioning as a conduit of self-presence, the voice often registers strain and resistance. These sounds do not resolve embodiment into legibility. They make audible the unevenness of transformation itself. Anchored in autoethnographic reflection as a trans woman, combined with close listening and philosophical inquiry, this paper re-reads foundational work in voice studies by Cavarero, Eidsheim, and Dolar through the sonic labor of trans vocalists. I propose a framework that attends to the material conditions of voicing—breath, friction, timbre, and constraint—without treating the voice as a site of expressive purity or self-unity. "After Vocal Uniqueness" approaches the voice as an acoustic remainder: a sound shaped by change but not fully reorganized by it, carrying both persistence and refusal. By centering voices that do not stabilize the subject, this paper expands the ethical and conceptual terrain of sound studies, foregrounding trans vocality as a mode of sounding embodied transformation without closure. | |