This is a recurring event: View all events in the series “Music Research Seminars”
Abstract
This seminar explores the position, perception, and potential affect of the voice in audiovisual media. An increasingly rich body of work considers the voice as both an intimate marker of personal and cultural identity and a bearer of specific rhythmic, timbral, melodic –musical – properties. The corporeal and cultural signification of the voice, and more specifically ideas of ‘fit’ between voice and context both on and off-screen, are central to understanding vocality, and why it can be such a significant and powerful element of the soundtrack.
Much of this research highlights moments of voice-body or voice-genre ‘infidelity’ (dubbing, poor ADR, lip-synch, unexpected singing, extremes of pitch, or post-production manipulation, for example) as sites of queer potential. Such instances disturb the audiovisual contract by drawing attention to the voice itself, rather than allowing it to operate less ‘audibly’ as a neutral carrier of dialogue. They foreground artifice and undermine immersion: we are reminded of and recognise the constructed nature of our experience. Whether accidental or intentional, these disruptions invite heightened self-awareness and foreground the perceiver’s subjectivity.
Here, however, I want to explore the idea that vocal fidelity might also be unsettling. And thereby that the audiovisual voice itself might hold the power to disengage or disturb, despite its familiar position at the top of various models of ‘vococentric’ perception. Using a range of film, television and game examples, I will examine the idea of the latently queer audiovisual voice from two (interwoven) perspectives: the voice as a recognisable, personal signifier of the body that connects to the extra-textual world of the perceiver; and the voice as inherently musical, and therefore capable of exceeding the perceptual boundaries of ‘information-carrier’ to become a playful, virtuosic, and/or authoritative means of grabbing attention. I explore the idea that the audiovisual voice might have the capacity to unsettle not only through disruption and infidelity, but also through familiarity, recognition, and apparent coherence.
About the speaker
Catherine Haworth is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Huddersfield. Her research focuses on musical practices of representation and identity across various media, especially film, television, and game music.
Catherine has published on topics including the female detective in 1940s Hollywood; music, gender and medical discourse; women and music in James Bond; and celebrity culture in the film musical.
She edited the 2012 special edition of MSMI on gender and sexuality, and co-edited the collections Gender, Age and Musical Creativity (Ashgate, 2015) and Singing Out: The Musical Voice in Audiovisual Media (EUP, 2025).
Performing Arts Research Seminars are hosted by SPARC (Sound Practice and Research at City St George’s) in the Department of Performing Arts at City St George’s, University of London. They bring together world-leading artists, practitioners, and scholars in the broad fields of performing arts.
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