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Channelling Voice

4 September 2025 at Liverpool John Moores University 

Channelling Voice is a conference supported by the Institute of Art and Technology at Liverpool John Moores University and Shady Dealings With Language in partnership with Silver Press.

Channelling Voice explores the political, historical, embodied and methodological production of voices whose sonic powers can be heard and felt. The conference expands Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear (Silver Press, 2024) with three panels exploring translation, processing and transmission, gathering contributors to the book and beyond across multiple disciplines and practices. 

The day is inaugurated by a keynote performance lecture by vocal and movement artist Elaine Mitchener and culminates with Cathy Lane, Emerita Professor of Sound Arts and author of Playing With Words, who will help us weave together the many critical threads of the day. Two film screenings operate as musical interludes: Verbaaaaatim, produced by Sonic Bothy, an ensemble of Disabled and non-Disabled musicians in Scotland, blurs improvisation, live captioning and score; and Contralto by Sarah Hennies, a composer in Upstate NY, whose 2019 film employs the sound of trans women's voices to explore transfeminine identity from the inside, opening up the intimate and peculiar relationship between gender and sound.

 

Schedule

09.30 Welcome with coffee 

10.00 Keynote performance lecture by Elaine Mitchener

10.45 Panel 1: Voice in Translation

How does voice travel and transmogrify? How is it magically and technologically distributed? Hannah Cobb and Nia Thomas, Gareth Gavin, Kristen Vida Alfaro, and chair Sarah Shin address the methods used to do this work on our behalf and the knowledge produced.

11:45 Interlude: Contralto by Sarah Hennies film screening 

12.45 Morning plenary 

13.15 Lunch

14.00 Panel 2: Processing Voice

This panel explores the processual, critical and technical support of voices that productively deviate from and stand against the aural norms of voicing. Ashley Holmes, Harriet Morley, Alison O'Daniel and chair Roy Claire Potter address how linguistic elements of voicing can be held and subverted by approaches to sonic and lyric processing.

15.00 Interlude: Verbaaaaatim by Sonic Bothy film screening

15.20 Coffee & book fair

16.00 Panel 3: Transmissions

Historical, technological and interpersonal distancing is the focus of this panel, as is the apparatus used to separate voices or maintain connection across chasms of disconnection. Roy Claire Potter, Shortwave Collective, Syma Tariq and chair Irene Revell speak of tools of relation in the archive, the classroom and the airwaves.  

17.00 Afternoon plenary and response by Cathy Lane

18.00 Ends 

All welcome; no booking required

Liverpool John Moores University, Redmond's Building Lecture Theatre 2, Brownlow Hill, Liverpool L3 5RF

Organised by Roy Claire Potter (Liverpool John Moores University), Sarah Shin (Silver Press, Spiral House) and Irene Revell (Goldsmiths, University of London and CRiSAP, UAL). Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear, edited by Revell and Shin, collects over fifty contributions to explore feminist sonic cultures and radical listening across essays, text scores, art, fiction, memoir and more. The contributors speak across gender, ways of knowing, witnessing, sounding and voicing, translation, displacement, violence and peace.


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