Graduate Symposium: Music, Sound and Liminality

• In-person event
• ML503 Jacob Siskind Music Resource Centre , MacOdrum Library, Carleton University
• 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6

• Contact
• Anna Hoefnagels, AnnaHoefnagels@CUNET.CARLETON.CA

» Download the program here. 

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Katherine Meizel

“Guess Who?: Voice and Liminality in Current Popular Culture”

A game-show panel tries to identify cartoonishly-masked celebrities after listening to them sing. Another panel decides who among a group must be the best singer, based only on lip syncing. Thousands of TikTok videos feature a bland digital voice that hides the posters’ own, or pass around a simulacrum of a voice whose original context has shattered into pieces that can no longer be fit back together. More than simply acousmatic, these televised or streamed voices demand that viewers attend to sonic and embodied presence and absence in new ways, to listen and imagine to something equally new that lives between the lines. This presentation will highlight how, in the 2020s, voice is heard and enacted as shaping liminal spaces and temporalities.

Katherine Meizel is Professor of Ethnomusicology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her book Idolized: Music, Media, and Identity in American Idol (IU Press) was published in 2011. The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies which she co-edited with Nina Eidsheim, was published in 2019, and her monograph Multivocality: Singing on the Borders of Identity was published in early 2020. With the nonprofit label Little Village Foundation, she co-produced the album Raise Your Voice: The Sound of Student Protest to document the 2018 protests against gun violence. Her writing has also appeared in public venues such as Slate, NPR.org, The New Republic, and The Conversation.