Embodied Voices

As a material link between body and culture, self and other, the voice has been endlessly fascinating to artists and critics. Yet it is the voices of women that have inspired the greatest fascination, as well as the deepest ambivalence, because the female voice signifies sexual otherness as well as sexual and cultural power. Embodied Voices explores cultural manifestations of female vocality in the light of current theories of subjectivity, the body and sexual difference. The fourteen essays collected here examine a wide spectrum of discourses, including myth, literature, music, film, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Though diverse in their critical approaches, the essays are united in their attempt to articulate the compelling yet problematic intersections of gender, voice, and embodiment as they have shaped the textual representation of women and women's self-expression in performance.

Embodied VoiceWork: Beyond Singing is an introduction to the theory and practice of Embodied VoiceWork (EVW), a comprehensive method developed by the author exploring vocal improvisation as an expressive language and transformational tool. This book serves as a resource for exploring one's own voice and using voice as an integral part of the therapeutic process. It lays out the resources and the power within the process of connecting into music, the body and the breath, and freeing the voice. This work has been applied in music therapy practice, arts education, and human potential work.

First-hand essays of embodied healing from the Center for Trauma and Embodiment at Justice Resource Institute: challenges, triumphs, and healing strategies for trauma-sensitive therapists and yoga teachers. All editor proceeds from Embodied Healing will fund direct access to Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY). This collection of essays explores the applications of TCTSY--Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga--as a powerful evidence-based modality to help clients heal in the aftermath of trauma. Written by a range of contributors including yoga facilitators, survivors, and therapists, the first-hand accounts in Healing with Trauma-Sensitive Yoga examine real-life situations and provide guidance on how to act, react, and respond to trauma on the mat. Each essay centers the voices, wisdom, and experiences of survivors and practitioners who work directly with trauma-sensitive embodiment therapies. From navigating issues of touch and consent to avoiding triggers, practitioners and readers will learn how to support survivors of trauma as they reintegrate their bodies and reclaim their lives. Organized into sections based on principles of trauma-sensitive yoga--experiencing the present moment, making choices, taking effective action, and creating rhythms--the 12 essays are for yoga teachers, therapists, survivors, and mental health professionals and trauma healers.

"Embodied Inquiry is offered to all who want to deepen the connection to their bodies. Here is the inspiration to see your body as a place of inquiry, learning, understanding and perceiving. Listening to the sensual knowing and aliveness within the body can inform our personal and professional lives and reveal the connections between living, being, and creating. Snowber writes this book in poetic and visceral language as a love letter from the body wooing readers to inhabit their own skins and celebrate the beautiful and paradoxical place where limitations and joy dwell together. Touching on the vastness of our body’s call to us, Embodied Inquiry explores solitude, paradox, inspiration, lament, waking up to the sensuous, ecology, listening, and writing from the body. This is not a manual, but a book to accompany you in befriending the body and let your own gestures, stories and bodily ways of being lead you to listen to your own rhythm. Whether an artist or educator, researcher or administrator, performer or poet, seeker or scientist, you will find this book as a companion to sustain a vibrant life and co-create a better world. “A beautiful, creative and highly original book. Written with passion and wisdom, this book makes significant contributions to arts-based research, artistic research practice, embodiment, and living artful, intentional and connected lives. A stunning achievement.” – Patricia Leavy, Ph.D., author of Method Meets Art and editor of the Social Fictions series “Snowber offers wisdom for learning to live exotically, erotically, emotionally, and ecstatically. Reading Embodied Inquiry is like walking on a wilderness trail, in sunlight-infused rain, learning to embrace the possibilities of vitality and vulnerability, joy and grief, love and loss.” – Carl Leggo, Ph.D., poet & professor, University of British Columbia “Weaving prose and poetry, Snowber awakens our sensual and embodied self at the very roots of living. This deeply personal work will move educators, researchers, artists, and those for whom lived experience is core to their creative processs.” – Daniel Deslauriers, Ph.D., Professor, Transformative Studies Doctorate Program, CIIS" /div

Voice Studies brings together leading international scholars and practitioners, to re-examine what voice is, what voice does, and what we mean by "voice studies" in the process and experience of performance. This dynamic and interdisciplinary publication draws on a broad range of approaches, from composing and voice teaching through to psychoanalysis and philosophy, including: voice training from the Alexander Technique to practice-as-research; operatic and extended voices in early baroque and contemporary underwater singing; voices across cultures, from site-specific choral performance in Kentish mines and Australian sound art, to the laments of Kraho Indians, Korean pansori and Javanese wayang; voice, embodiment and gender in Robertson’s 1798 production of Phantasmagoria, Cathy Berberian radio show, and Romeo Castellucci’s theatre; perceiving voice as a composer, listener, or as eavesdropper; voice, technology and mobile apps. With contributions spanning six continents, the volume considers the processes of teaching or writing for voice, the performance of voice in theatre, live art, music, and on recordings, and the experience of voice in acoustic perception and research. It concludes with a multifaceted series of short provocations that simply revisit the core question of the whole volume: what is voice studies?

The author discusses the existing theoretical approaches of semiotically informed research in HCI, what is useful and the limitations. He proposes a radical rethink to this approach through a re-evaluation of important semiotic concepts and applied semiotic methods. Using a semiotic model of interaction he explores this concept through several studies that help to develop his argument. He concludes that this semiotics of interaction is more appropriate than other versions because it focuses on the characteristics of interactive media as they are experienced and the way in which users make sense of them rather than thinking about interface design or usability issues.

This interdisciplinary collection explores the role the body plays in constituting our sense of self, signalling the interplay between material embodiment, social meaning, and material and social conditions.

This SpringerBrief provides a unique insight into the practice and research of the connections between voice, HCI and embodiment. Specifically, it explores how the voice can be embodied and mediated by means of gestural communication through sensor interfaces and aims to situate and contextualise various aspects that generate meaningful connections in such interactive interface performance. The author offers an approach for understanding creative practices between humans and computers in gestural live music performance, from the perspective of the embodied relationships created within such systems. Underlying practices, principles and sensor technologies that support creativity in embodied human-computer interaction in vocal music performance are examined and a dynamic framework and tools for anyone wishing to engage with this subject in depth are presented. The book is essential reading not only for musicians, composers, researchers, application developers, musicologists and educators but also for students and tertiary institutions as well as actors and dramaturgs in a music context.

Expert, practical help for women who preach or lead worship Many women preachers and worship leaders have trouble speaking; they struggle to fully use their physical voices. Maintaining that there is often a disconnect between the woman's self-understanding as a preacher and her own body, Nancy Lammers Gross presents not only techniques but also a theologically empowering paradigm shift to help women fully embody their God-given preaching vocations. Grounding her work in the biblical story of Miriam, Gross begins with a discussion of how women are instrumental in the work of God. She then tells stories, including her own, of women's experiences in losing connection to their bodies and their physical voices. Finally, Gross presents a constructive resolution with exercises for discovering and developing a full-body voice.