Node 38. How to Do Things with the Voice: Toward an Expanded and Mutant Understanding of Vocality

Deadline: 1 October 2025

Submissions to be published in issue 38 (February 2026)

The guest editors are Arnau Horta and Monten Søndergaard

What is a voice?

Put into writing, this question seems to pose a contradiction: a kind of aberrant interrogation that reveals the impossibility of providing a satisfactory answer through language alone. Speaking properly about the voice would, after all, be a capacity exclusive to the voice itself—an utterance unfolding in resonance from (but also beyond) a body. The voice takes advantage of its radical autonomy from both the discursive and the corporeal, articulating a unique relationship to presence and absence, interiority and exteriority. As Mladen Dolar reminds us, the voice always exceeds discourse and meaning. It is surplus, residue—at once expressive and excessive.

Yet the voice is not only a metaphysical surplus or aesthetic trace. It is also a sonic threshold—a boundary between body and world, self and other. As such, the voice might be understood parasitically, in Michel Serres’ sense: as interference, a vibrational contagion, or even a noisy intrusion. The voice can carry with it echoes, interruptions, hauntings—those ghostly artifacts of signal degradation, memory, or machine mediation. What, then, is the relation between voice and noise? Can noise itself be understood as a vocal act? What kinds of parasitic or viral vocalities emerge in today’s hypermediated soundscapes—from deepfakes to vocal fry, from shamanic chant to glitching interfaces?

This call for contributions proposes to explore such mutations and expansions of voice across disciplines, cultures, and species. If we are to take seriously the proposition that voice is not the exclusive domain of the human, we must also interrogate how non-human, more-than-human, and machinic voices enter into our fields of perception, communication, and affect. This requires not only new methods of listening but new ontologies of what voice can be and do.

Building on the foundational question of performativity—paraphrasing J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words—this issue asks instead:

How to do things with the voice?

What kinds of aesthetic, affective, political, and epistemic operations are made possible through vocal acts? How is the voice co-constructed with technologies, ecologies, and social practices? What does it mean to “have” a voice in contexts of vocal disempowerment or enforced silence? How is voice entangled with the sonic environment in which it resonates, modulates, and disperses?

We particularly welcome contributions that engage with the following critical and interdisciplinary topics or any combination between these.


Suggested Critical Topics for Submission:

- Voice, Noise, and Parasitism:
The voice as a parasite, echo, interference, or disruption. Sonic boundaries between signal and noise. The aesthetics and politics of vocal contamination or overflow.

- Voice as Boundary Object:
How does the voice demarcate the threshold between body and world, self and other, interior and exterior? The phenomenology and metaphysics of voice as liminal presence.

- Cross-Cultural and Indigenous Vocal Practices:
Comparative explorations of voice and vocality in ritual, healing, resistance, and cosmology. How do different cultures conceptualize the relation between voice, body, and spirit?

- Vocal Technologies and Machinic Subjects:
AI voices, voice assistants, vocal synthesis, deepfakes, autotune. What forms of agency, authorship, or identity are produced in synthetic or augmented vocalities?

- Voice and Silence:
Political, existential, or ecological readings of vocal absence. Whose voices are heard or silenced? What are the ethics of voicing and unvoicing?

- Vocal Ecologies and More-than-Human Voices:
Animal calls, plant responses, sonic environments, and machinic resonance. Listening practices that extend beyond anthropocentrism. Vocality in multispecies assemblages.

- The Grain of the Non-Human Voice:
Revisiting Barthes in light of posthumanist and object-oriented theories: Can a machine or a tree have a “grain”? What is the materiality of non-human vocal expression?

- Vocal Psychedelia and the Altered Voice:
Voices stretched, delayed, filtered, glitched. Vocal effects as portals into altered states or trans-subjective zones (cf. Kit Mackintosh). Psychedelic vocalities and their cultural politics.

- The Social Voice / The Political Voice:
Voice as access, power, protest, or refusal. Voices that occupy space, challenge regimes, or forge solidarities. Trans*feminist, decolonial, and activist perspectives on voice.

- Voice, Affect, and Disorientation:
The voice as carrier of emotion, memory, trauma, or uncanny familiarity. Affective vocality in performance, media, and everyday encounters.

- Voices of extinction:
Speculative and poetic strategies for reworking voices that are extincted.

We invite researchers, artists, performers, sound practitioners, and collectives to engage with these (or other emergent) questions around the doings of voice. Submissions may take the form of academic articles, essays, sonic works, performative texts, interviews, or experimental formats. We especially encourage work that crosses or unsettles disciplinary boundaries.

Let us listen —across signal and noise, body and machine, human and more-than-human—to what voices do, and to what they might yet become.