Conference Agenda

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.

Released in 1980, both the Village People’s quasi-biopic Can’t Stop the Music and William Friedkin’s thriller Cruising presented distorted images of contemporaneous gay life. Both depicted New York’s gay community, yet they contrasted wildly in tone: one being colorful, campy, and closeted; the other seedy, perverse, and deadly. Although seemingly different in all respects, both films placed music centerstage and positioned a similar insider-versus-outsider musical world in which classical music signified difference. Building on recent studies of queerness in film music by James Buhler, Jack Dubowsky, and Scott Paulin, I examine how these two films navigated queer representation at a time when commercial culture was warming to gay-centered narratives.

In this paper, I analyzes how both films used classical music as a polyvalent symbol whose meaning changed based on who controlled the narrative. In Cruising, the straight creative team used the music of Luigi Boccherini to signal heteronormative respectability, while using punk music to represent queer deviancy. These genres’ extant associations with groups at the margins of society—disaffected youth and venerable elite—allowed the creators to delineate gay and straight worlds as diametrically opposed despite characters in the film belonging to neither associated group. By contrast, the predominantly gay creative team behind Can’t Stop the Music aligned its queer-coded characters with classical music and Broadway icons to elevate their cultural status (and to rehabilitate disco’s reputation after its untimely death). Analyzing the music in these films clarifies their depictions of queerness and ultimately demonstrates the anxieties over gay male portrayals in films of the post-Stonewall era.

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.