Voice+ Speaker Series: J. Martin Daughtry
Join the Voice+ Lab for a talk by J. Martin Daughtry, associate professor of ethnomusicology and sound studies at New York University, on "Panvocalism: Atmospheric Transcripts from the End of the World."
About the Talk
From the standpoint of the earth's atmosphere, a human voice is little more than a puff of air rejoining the greater atmospheric body after a period of temporary confinement in a writhing tube of flesh. What, if anything, separates this puff from other atmospheric emissions? What is the expressive content of a human sigh, a car's exhaust, a methane leak, or a blast of war dust?
Daughtry's work draws from ethnomusicology, sound studies, the anthropology of the senses, and the ethnographic study of violence. He is the author of Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq. His longstanding research projects—on the sonic dimension of modern warfare, Soviet and post-Soviet musical practices, music in the post-9/11 world, the dynamics of the auditory imagination, and the multifaceted significance of human and nonhuman vocality—all explore the capacities and limits of sonic cultures in a complex world of often-violent change.
Daughtry's current book project, On Voice and Air: Precarious Songs of the Anthropocene, draws upon his longstanding interest in vocality, but it treats the voice less as a meaning-saturated sound that humans make, and more as a form of consequential gaseous exchange that involves humans, nonhuman creatures, machines, and geological processes. Human voice involves sound, but it also involves a billowing of air from your body that creates a state of co-vulnerability between you and those near you. You inhale, and tiny particulates from cars and power plants, and nuclear tests enter your body. You sing out, and a microbial swarm is released. Voices express thoughts, but they also “express” particulate matter into the atmosphere. As such, voices are tied into cultural and environmental processes. Gaseous emissions tell stories, whether they are coming from our mouths or our livestock or our car exhausts, or our landfills. In this book, Daughtry tries to relate some of these stories—stories told by human and nonhuman voices, stories told in sound and beyond sound, stories about intimate encounters, and about the end of the world.
Co-sponsored by the Voice+ Research Lab and the Atlanta Global Studies Center