A Powerful Voice: Investigating Vocality and Identity

Though the word has been naturalized to the point that writers rarely offer a working definition, a reexamination of its interrelated uses across studies of cognitive science and acoustics, language, literary criticism, and music reveals its layered significance as a site where the making of sounds and the making of identity intersect. Each approach looks for different meaning, investigating the voice as a vehicle for the variety of communicative, expressive, and ideological processes at the heart of speech and song. This essay surveys the idea of vocality as it has developed across history and disciplines, proposes a holistic model for its study in the context of music, and begins to unpack the heavy sociocultural baggage that accompanies it. It is my hope that these efforts may be of use to voice and speech professionals as they seek to tap the fullest potential of the voice in performance, and to grasp the entirety of what a voice carries, when it carries across a theater or podium—not only lexical meanings and emotion, but also vital information about culture, identity, and the dynamics of power that suffuses human communication.