Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Volume 19 Number 2/3 August/December 2018
(Final Issue)
___________________________________________________________________
Neumark, Norie. Voicetracks: attuning to voice in media and the arts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017. 215 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-03613-9 (hardcover).
Reviewed by
Valparaiso University
This book explores the many voices, both literal and metaphorical, which the author has experienced and engaged with through a variety of mediums and processes. Both academic and personal in tone and presentation, the author uses a “wayfaring” approach in her documentation and discussion regarding the various ways in which voices are heard, sounded, remixed, and understood. The Introduction is a detailed manifesto of the process and the results, with an extensive scholarly examination of the literature related to tracking voices, both human and animal. Cultural, subjective, feminist, emotional, movement, performance, verbal and nonverbal theories on this topic provide an in-depth background for the reader and the author to launch into new materialities and subjectivities surrounding human and animal voices. Aspects of listening, with discussion of the topic of pataphysics, is included along with discussions of situated and carnal knowledge in materialism and posthumanism studies. The term “voicetrack” is then explained, wrapped around the ensounded voice, which goes beyond just sound or music but encompasses all of the many paths which the voice follows, whether it is singing, humming, speaking, whistling, or murmuring.
Chapter 2 examines how artists work with animal sounds and voices, and how animal studies are part of the 21st-century voicetracks. Challenges with ethics and affect are explored. Chapter 3 focuses on voices of places, and here the author focuses on artists’ installation works, since the basis is on placed and specific rather than abstract pathways. Chapter 4 delves into the voices of technologies, not from the voices that they mediate but as they speak for themselves. Chapter 5 explores the concept of unvoicing, disturbances in voicetrack relations and strange evocations of the origins and the speech of voices. The final chapter encapsulates the ethics and politics which are mentioned and suggested in the previous chapters. The author mentions much of her own previous scholarship and work here, providing some conclusions related to understandings and apprehensions on this topic combined with the musings contained from the writing of this book. A short foray into silence and its effects on voicetracks moves the discussion towards future explorations and experiments on this topic. An existential and metaphysical approach towards both the topic and the writing means that the reader is constantly engaged with the author’s personal style and flow of memories, thoughts, perceptions, and experiences with both human and non-human voices in society, media, and the arts.