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.
All welcome: there is no booking required. It will be live streamed via Teams. Email R.C.Potter@ljmu.ac.uk before the day to be added to the Teams guest list. Captioning available.
Liverpool John Moores University, Redmond's Building Lecture Theatre 2, Brownlow Hill, Liverpool L3 5RF
Schedule
09.30 Welcome with coffee
10.00 Keynote performance lecture by Elaine Mitchener
10.45 Panel 1: Voice in Translation
11:45 Interlude: Contralto by Sarah Hennies film screening
12.45 Morning plenary
13.15 Lunch
14.00 Panel 2: Processing Voice
15.00 Interlude: Verbaaaaatim by Sonic Bothy film screening
15.20 Coffee & book fair
16.00 Panel 3: Transmissions
17.00 Afternoon plenary and response by Cathy Lane
18.00 Ends
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Panel details
Panel 1: Voice in Translation explores how voice travels and is transmogrified and distributed. Our panelists address the geopolitical, ecological or technological means of distribution and the knowledge produced through these processes. With Hannah Cobb and Nia Thomas, Gareth Gavin, Kristen Alfaro, and chair Sarah Shin.
Gareth Gavin – Vowel Sounds and Boundary Lines
Kristen Vida Alfaro – Wild Tongues: Literary Translation and the Deterritorialisation of Language
Hannah Cobb and Nia Thomas – What Does Democracy Sound Like?: Murmurations, entropy and the voice as an indicator of political agency
Panel 2: Processing Voice deals with the processual, critical and technical support of voices that productively deviate from and stand against the aural norms of voicing. Panelists address how linguistic elements of voicing can be held and subverted by approaches to sonic and lyric processing. With Ashley Holmes, Harriet Morley, Alison O'Daniel and chair Roy Claire Potter.
Alison O’Daniel – Opening Captions
Ashley Holmes – Dub Epistemologies: Black Atlantic Voice as Collaboration and Version
Harriet Morley – Misnomers Misspeakings
Panel 3: Transmissions focusses on historical, technological and interpersonal distancing, as well as the apparatus used to separate voices or maintain connection across chasms of disconnection. Panelists speak of tools of relation in the archive, the classroom and the airwaves. With Roy Claire Potter, Shortwave Collective, Syma Tariq and chair Irene Revell.
Roy Claire Potter – COMMS FAIL: Sharing the Problem of Listening
Syma Tariq – Troubling Testimony
Shortwave Collective represented by Brigitte Hart and Hannah Kemp-Welch – Resisting the Clear Channel
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Biographies
Kristen Vida Alfaro is the Executive Director and Publisher of Tilted Axis Press. She is also a writer and has previously led labour and anti-racist organising at the Barbican. In a former life, Kristen pursued (and left) a doctorate in Cinema Studies at New York University. She is based in London and has appeared in The New York Times and Vogue Japan for her work with Tilted Axis.
Hannah Cobb is a generalist working out of Manchester, UK. She works across design, visual art, writing, filmmaking, sound design and curation, and is 1/2 of the duo Y7, who write, curate and speak at events internationally, with emerging technologies and cultures at the core of their practice.
Gareth Gavin is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, where he works in the Centre for New Writing. He is the author of two novels and a critical monograph and is often interested in work that moves between the creative and the critical.
Sarah Hennies is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist.
Ashley Holmes is an artist interested in publishing, broadcasting and methods of producing and distributing sound. His recent work examines how Western norms of ownership shape the circulation of music, rights of access to land, and wider relationships to place. Ashley is a resident on NTS Radio and hosts Tough Matter, a show of experimental music and sound. He teaches on the BA Fine Art programme at Liverpool John Moores University where he is also currently completing an MA in Fine Art.
Cathy Lane is an artist, composer and academic. She works primarily in sound, combining oral history, archival recordings, spoken word and environmental recordings to investigate histories, environments, our collective and individual memories and the forces that shape them. She is inspired by places or themes which are rooted in everyday experience and particularly interested in ‘hidden histories’ and historical amnesia and how this can be investigated from a feminist perspective through the medium of composed sound. She is interested in what other people hear and don’t hear and the stories that they tell about these listenings. Most of her work is in the form of gallery installations, concert pieces, books and essays. She is the author of Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice and the chapter ‘Gender, Intimacy and Voice in Sound Art’ in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art, She is Professor Emerita of Sound Arts at University of the Arts London and the former Director, and co-founder of CRiSAP, Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP), a UAL research centre.
Elaine Mitchener is a British Afro-Caribbean vocalist, movement artist and composer working between contemporary/experimental new music, free improvisation and visual art. She is currently a Wigmore Hall Associate Artist, also an Artist Associate with ENSEMBLE KLANG and a NEEDCompany Fellow. Elaine was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow (2022), an exhibiting artist in the British Art Show 9 (2021-22) and in 2020 a selected artist for the Rauschenberg Residency. In February 2022 Mitchener was awarded an MBE for Services to Music. Her debut album SOLO THROAT was released in May 2024 under Café Oto’s OTORUKO label. As a guest curator Elaine developed and presented Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery’s Deep Time Festival (Basquiat&Cage 8424) and Politics of the Voice for Courtisane Festival (Ghent, Belgium). Composers and artists she has worked and collaborated with include: George E Lewis, Jennifer Walshe, Tansy Davies, Rolf Hind, Laure M Hiendl, Matana Roberts; visual artists Sonia Boyce, Christian Marclay and The Otolith Group; chamber ensembles Apartment House, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble MAM, Ensemble Klang, Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble and Klangforum Wien; choreographer Dam Van Huynh and experimental musicians such as Moor Mother, Joelle Leandre, Saul Williams, Pat Thomas and David Toop. Elaine is founder of the collective electroacoustic unit The Rolling Calf.
Leveraging the leakiness of mishearings and misspeakings in speech, Harriet Morley plays with homophones and homographs to explore the slipperiness of meaning, sometimes retooling automated or commercialised language to disrupt its context. She works across sound, performance, and text to play with communication glitches, attention dispersal and the sonics of the voice.
Alison O’Daniel is a d/Deaf visual artist and filmmaker. She builds a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary in her work that reveals (or proposes) a politics of sound that exceeds the ear. Her film ‘The Tuba Thieves’ premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast on PBS and Arte in 2024. O’Daniel is a United States Artist 2022 Disability Futures Fellow and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video. She is represented by Commonwealth and Council gallery in Los Angeles and is working on her second feature film. O’Daniel is the Suraj Israni Endowed Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts in the Visual Arts department at University of California, San Diego.
Roy Claire Potter is an artist writer who is often found working with musicians and sound artists toward staged and radio broadcast performances. Roy’s artistic concern with communication can be framed by terms like Critical Autism Studies and Experimental Art Writing. They are currently working on COMMS FAIL, a performance project concerned with radio communications in times of crisis, centring autistic knowledge, commissioned by Unlimited and Liverpool Biennial for 2026.
Shortwave Collective is an international feminist artist group using the electromagnetic spectrum as artistic material. They deliver frequent workshops, constructing ecological and open radio receivers that connect the listener to a fusion of natural radio emissions and human-generated transmissions. Their collective practice also includes performances and installations. Shortwave Collective’s active members are Alyssa Moxley, Brigitte Hart, Georgia Leigh-Münster, Hannah Kemp-Welch and Maria Papadomanolaki.
Sonic Bothy is an ensemble of Disabled and non-Disabled musicians create original works that define new ideas with accessibility underpinning, radically shaping the music. Their eclectic interests span from free improvisation, contemporary classical, trad, dance, electroacoustic, musicals, and noise. www.sonicbothy.co.uk
Dr Syma Tariq is a researcher and sound practitioner based in London, UK. Drawing on feminist listening practices and theory, colonial a/temporality, and audio archiving experiments, she is interested in what listening can do when it meets extractive and differentiating knowledge systems. Her doctoral research project Partitioned Listening, completed at CRISAP, University of the Arts London, focused on the forms and processes of aural-archival knowledge production relating to the 1947 Partition of British India. Her wider interest in sound has evolved through journalism, radio, writing and DJing.
Nia Thomas (they/them) is a UK-based researcher and Project Producer at Policy Lab, a team within the Civil Service working to make policymaking more open, participatory, and people-centred. Their work focuses on the potential of co-design, games, and experimental methods to drive social change—whether through better policy design or by addressing issues like detachment, isolation, and exclusion. Previously, Nia was a Curatorial Assistant at FACT Gallery in Liverpool and worked across various roles at Comma Press. Nia has led panels and interviews at events such as the Hay Festival, London Book Fair, and Sant Jordi Festival in New York. They are in the process of co-establishing a Devolved Policy Observatory to explore how policy in Greater Manchester might move beyond a solely human-centred lens, taking into account the broader interconnections between people, ecosystems, and other non-human actors.
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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.