Katya Davisson

Area of proposed thesis

My research explores the relationship between voice, technology, and selfhood in contemporary musical performance. Although the voice is often understood as an intimate expression of personal identity, emerging technologies increasingly allow singers to multiply, transform, and even exchange the voices through which they are heard. My DPhil examines how these possibilities challenge our assumptions about the relationship between a voice and the person who produces it. Through case studies drawn from contemporary opera, experimental music, and live performance, I investigate four forms of technologically mediated vocal multiplicity: duplication, delegation, transformation, and transfer. Bringing together philosophy, musicology, sound studies, and theories of performance and perception, my research considers how vocal identity, bodily experience, and agency are reconfigured when a singer's audible voice no longer corresponds straightforwardly to its source. Rather than treating these technologies as disruptions of an otherwise stable relationship between voice and self, I suggest that they expose a multiplicity already inherent in vocal expression. In doing so, my research develops new ways of understanding the singing voice as a site through which personhood is both experienced and imagined, whilst addressing wider questions of identity, embodiment, and the ethical implications of emerging voice technologies.

Research interests

Philosophies of voice, music and technology; contemporary opera and experimental performance; sound studies; embodiment and selfhood; AI voice technologies.

Funding

Louis Curran—Oxford Scholarship

Degrees

BA (Hons); MA