Conference Agenda

In 1958, amid growing racial tensions surrounding desegregation and Cold War era fear-mongering, radio waves in the US were inundated by an influx of novelty hits featuring sped- and pitched-up vocals, which take on a bright, unnatural, and nasally character due to the tape speed manipulation. Bookending this trend were two songs written and performed by Ross Bagdasarian at independent label Liberty Records: “Witch Doctor” and “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late).” The former, released in January, kickstarted the trend with its sped- and pitched-up doctor, a jumbled, exoticized stereotype of pseudo-shamanist practices giving love advice in gibberish syllables. The latter, released in December, was the debut of fictional singing trio Alvin and the Chipmunks, who became so inextricably linked to the sound of sped- and pitched up voices that they gave the effect the name by which it is now known: the chipmunk voice. Along with Sheb Wooley’s “Purple People Eater,” about a seemingly threatening but harmless rock n’ roll alien, these were the massive hits of the sped-up craze of 1958, where what would come to be known as the chipmunk voice was used to signify cartoon animals, alien creatures, and people of color indiscriminately.

This paper traces how the sped-up voice became a site for performing and dehumanizing racial Otherness in the US in the late 1950’s. Building on Nina Sun Eidsheim’s work on Blackness and vocality as well as Steven Connor’s notion of vocalic bodies, I consider how the uncanniness of the sped- and pitched-up voice, which on its own might provoke unease in listeners, prompted artists to provide imagined vocalic bodies that would seem both strange and nonthreatening, conflating people of color with animals and aliens. I argue that this sped-up craze provided a vehicle for voicing, mocking, and dehumanizing “strangeness” during the struggle for civil rights for people of color in the US and in wake of the McCarthy era, where those in power cast identity-based and ideological difference as threatening to the American way of life.

A hip-hop record contains a whooshing sound: who, or what, might that be? Conventional wisdom proposes the scratching of turntables, but a subsequent viewing of the music video suggests otherwise. Could it instead be the sound of thrusting swords and spears of traditional wushu (Chinese martial arts)? Sounds in motion, sounds in translation: these are by now truisms in the study of music, a medium defined by its multivalence, transnational mobility, and material inconsistency (Tunbridge 2018; Abbate and Gallope 2021). Extending Nina Sun Eidsheim’s recent meditations on voice, sound, and race (Eidsheim 2019), my talk attends to this moment of the whoosh to propose a theory of what we might call “intercultural punning.”

The phenomenon of intercultural punning proliferates especially in the age of recording technology, when musical sound becomes ever more portable across cultural and national boundaries. Alongside material gains, however, sound and source become constitutively severed in more ways than one, amplifying epistemological anxieties about sonic, cultural, and political identity. In dealing with the acousmatic question of sound’s fugitivity, my talk approaches sound as a species of wit. Taking Taiwanese singer-songwriter Jay Chou’s 2006《霍元甲》(“Huo Yuanjia”) as a test case, it explores how various instances of intercultural punning—timbral, gestural, and multimedial— braid together hip-hop and Chinese cultural practices in ways that raise anew questions about the relationship between the histories of Africa and Asia, nationalism and decolonization, and political hope and heartbreak. What happens when different cultures are placed on a collision course? What cultural and political alliances or frictions emerge? To understand transnational cultural migration in its complexities and contradictions, this talk suggests moving beyond the polarity of cultural appropriation and assimilation to tease out alternative possibilities for the liberation of the global south. To rethink sound in translation—to play, make, and listen to music otherwise—is to ask, finally, what it means to be free.

Through a case study of Japanese anime voice dramas, this paper explores a transmedia approach to address the ongoing heteronormative, binary, and patriarchal production of women’s bodies in contemporary Japanese anime. Women’s preference for the vocal and men’s preference for the visual have been ends of a historically embedded binary constructed by anime production companies. Japanese anime fans and scholars of popular media have correlated the growth in anime voice production since the 2010s with the rising status of Japanese women audiences. Women audiences have growing product choices, such as voice dramas, radio shows, and audio technology to pursue their aural fantasy. They also form communities and gain public spaces to share their support for anime voices. Based on ethnographic fieldwork from 2023 to 2025, as well as historical materials from interviews, social media, and journal articles, this paper presents a paradox in this liberation of women audiences through voice.

This paper references “ornamentalism” (Cheng 2018), which recognizes Asiatic feminine bodies as “superficial, detachable, migratory” ornaments, in the context of contemporary multimedia Japanese anime. In doing so, I trace how women audiences listen to their body parts from the female character’s perspective in interactive voice dramas (or “Situation CDs”). These voice dramas target women audiences with the goal of “serving” them with male voices. Situation CDs mute the female protagonist to allow the woman listener to project herself onto her, while male voices fill the CD, instructing the female character's actions and interacting with her different body parts. By focusing on how women audiences listen to their feet, ears, and skin, I argue that men’s voices mold the body of the female character and, simultaneously, that of the woman listener. By examining women’s transmedially scattered bodies, this paper decenters visuality and the masculine gaze, problematizing the separation between the fictional anime world and the real world in theorizing the mediatized influences on women’s bodies. It suggests voice as an analytical medium that emphasizes a transmedia approach to address the production of women’s bodies in contemporary multimedia culture, not as metaphorical, but as materialized and metonymic.