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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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:53am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Queer Voices/Queer Narratives Session Chair: Jacob Kopcienski | |
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Porous Voices, “Vocaloidized” Voices: Queer Listening, Cyborgs, and Transnational Girlhood in the Digital Age Colby College This paper examines the entangled relation between the body and machine, examining gender bias within Vocaloid technology and music culture. I use “vocalodized” voice to argue that vocal style operates as a set of border-crossing acts It highlights the entangled relationship between technology, identity, and the human body (Eidsheim 2019). It then destabilizes borders between naturalized, national identity and vocal authenticity (McLeod 2013, Cheng 2019). Expanding embodied approach to vocal timbre analysis (Heidemann 2016), I attend to moments where my embodied imitation fails to queer my vocal analysis. My queer listening foregrounds the “disruptions,” “glitches,” “noises,” “unpleasantness,” “negativities,” and “failures” of listening as confronting politics of identity (gender, race, and intersectionality) and power (Dilley 1999, Brooks 2015). Through fan’s co-production, Vocaloid music (an amateur music-making culture centered around voice synthesizer technology) is open to gendered (re)interpretation through co-production within the fan community (dōjin bunka). In Yoasobi’s “Idol” (2023), the first J-pop track that topped the Billboard Global Excl. US Chart, Ikuta’s bright, sweet, and clear tone is mediated by auto-tune and compression to promote a synthetic, neo-liberal girlhood. Such new trend of vocal aesthetics connotates an idolized girlhood that has been promoted globally in K-pop and its American fandom discourse, showing that “vocalodized” voice appear to transcend the boundaries of racial body and the embedded racial and national meaning, in which global audiences can project their own identities and desires, facilitated by sound technology and digital media platforms that transcend the boundaries of what is considered “Japanese” or “bodily” (Iwabuchi 2002). However, these projected border-crossings of girlhood risk reinforcing a neoliberalist perfectionism against feminine voice and feminine body (Weideman 2014). Borrowing Jennifer Iverson’s (2015) notion of a “porous voice,” I conclude that the cyborgian construction of vocal timbre and gendered vocal expressions in popular music recordings, noting a spiral, reciprocal relationship between human and machine. Technology is in the ubiquitous presence of any popular voice one perceives, while any technology is also conditioned and limited by human input and their production of knowledge. | |