ABSTRACT
In colloquial terms, western thought and language tend to treat the sound of the voice, the material voice, and what the voice produces as the same. As classicist Shane Butler notes, these ambiguities can be traced back to at least as early as ancient discussions of the phōnē and vox, the two principal Greek and Latin words for “voice.” 1 This chapter addresses two problems associated with these ambiguities which have consequently shaped sensorial experience and understanding to align with these and related phenomena. First, academia is splintered into areas of specialization. As Tomie Hahn has pointed out, research has historically been divided by the senses: to bring out the differences, we can note that ethnomusicologists, for instance, observe through listening; dance scholars specialize in physical and tactile inquiry; and musicologists observe through reading manuscripts. 2 Because each field builds not only on the premise of an artificially separated segment of a rich phenomenon but also on the inherent diffuseness of definitions, each discrete area of research is limited in its efforts to capture the phenomenon at hand. Second, both scholarly investigation and everyday experience of most phenomena are built upon a naturalized cultural and social sensorial framework, and this framework separates the senses. It is through these imprecise perspectives that processes of knowledge creation are set into motion and subsequently become established. And, it is such an iterative process that has defined these scholarly fields for themselves and in opposition to one another.
