ABSTRACT
In “The Policing of the Non-Human Voice,” Chris Tonelli theorises we can learn important lessons about the meanings we attach to the sounds of singing voices by examining the experiences of singers who use extended vocal techniques or soundsinging that audiences work to police, correct, or contain. Employing an arts-centred and practice-led research method wherein reactions to his own vocal improvisation (in duos with Paul Dutton) are analysed, Tonelli generates a theoretical framework for linking policing behaviours of listeners to a broader symbolic system that protects their notions of their own fully-Human status against violations of that system enacted by vocal sounds listeners perceive as animal sound or disabled vocal sound. Tonelli compares these policing behaviours with a reaction by radio host Howard Stern to Yoko Ono and her 2014 performance at the Glastonbury Festival. The comparison examines the ways race, gender, homophobia, ableism, liveness, and mediatisation factor into these types of encounters. In the chapter, Tonelli draws on disability studies research, Lindon Barrett’s theorisation of modernity, Freya Jarman-Ivens’s work on queer voices, Alexander Weheliye’s discussion of the non-human and the not-quite-human, and Jacques Rancière’s notions of politics and policing.
