Voice / Body

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison

— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

During SØSTR’s live performances and songwriting, in addition to using our voices to sing, we process our voices with various effects that manipulate the timbre and characteristics of the sound. This draws the listeners to the textures of otherworldly vocalities, such as androgynous, machine-like, dreamy, and ethereal voices, like slipping into sonic masks, shifting shapes and identities. Perhaps this sonic puppeteering can open the potential of an unknown—the “appearance of the more.”

In the context of spatialization, the disembodied voices transform through mediated virtual sound objects that travel through space as characters in their own right and can morph into new constellations of sonic bodies, such as flocking birds and particles. It is somehow liberating when the reimagining of the voice, not as something confined to the physical body but as a mutable force, becomes capable of detachment, dispersal, and transformation. Sometimes, the voice completely dissolves and is no longer recognizable as a voice, as it becomes part of the instrumentation. Voices are less about who we are as humans and artistic personas, brands, and sisters or brothers, and more about who we can become through sonic sculpting of the materiality of voice.

Anatomy of the voice

This playful distortion offers a way of giving shape to phrases that resist articulation through the voice one is born with to move beyond language and the social constructs of the voice understood as feminine or gendered. This gesture resonates with Donna Haraway’s (1991) cyborg, which refuses fixed identities and embraces hybridity: “The Cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world” (Haraway, p. 67).

In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. She wrote that a woman’s mind “shapes itself to the body,” confined to a “gilt cage” built by beauty and expectation. Perhaps even today, we can think of voices within this “prison,” where girls from early childhood are taught to sound soft, sweet, agreeable. The voice, like the mind, adapts to the body, gender, and expectations alike.

From the sacred melodies of Hildegard von Bingen to the polyphonic overtones of throat singing, improvisations of Indian vocalists, and modal complexities of Gregorian and Byzantine chants, humans across centuries and cultures have continually expanded the expressive potential of the human voice.

In Renaissance Europe, voice was revered as the purest form of human expression, particularly within sacred and choral traditions. Instruments were designed in direct imitation of the human voice: The recorder evoked the clarity of a boy soprano, and string instruments mirrored the blending quality of choral harmonies. The anatomical voice, formed by breath, larynx, and tongue, was viewed as the ideal of musical perfection, rooted in the body and bound by its physical limits.

In New Atlantis (1627), Sir Francis Bacon described a speculative laboratory of sound where “we also imitate the voices and notes of beasts and birds… and have means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.” This vision not only anticipated modern sonic technologies but also questioned the fixed relationship between voice, source, and body. Bacon’s imaginary “sound houses” foreshadowed contemporary sound engineering and vocal manipulation, revealing an early desire to detach the voice from the body and reframe it as a crafted, mediated phenomenon.

The Euphonia was a talking machine by the Austrian inventor Joseph Faber (1845)

That questioning deepened with the invention of “talking machines”—mechanical devices and speaking heads, such as Euphonia, which sought to reproduce the voice by mimicking the anatomy of speech—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These machines used bellows as lungs, reeds as vocal cords, and tubes for throats. However, the results have been described as “monotonous” voices that hovered between the human and the mechanical, and between sound and source, revealing that a voice could emerge from something other than a living body (Hankins & Silverman, 1995).

Joan La Barbara performing in 1976.

In the twentieth century, artists such as Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, and Joan La Barbara were using technology, extended vocal techniques, and performance art to explore new dimensions of vocal expression. Joan La Barbara’s Voice Is the Original Instrument (1976) showcased techniques such as multiphonics, overtones, and breath sounds, in which the voice became a tool for sonic exploration, allowing voices to fragment, merge, and reform in ways that challenged the limits of both the vocal apparatus and the performer’s identity.

Today, digital and AI technologies push this transformation even further. Voices can be sampled, synthesized, spatialized, and generated entirely without ever passing through a human throat. Projects such as Holly Herndon’s PROTO, in which she collaborates with an AI-generated version of her own voice, challenge the very notion of the voice as being inherently tied to the body, demonstrating that voices can now be both human and machine, living and artificial, and real and virtual. However problematic AI tools may prove to be in the (near) future, with these technologies, the voice becomes a shape-shifting entity capable of becoming any sound or sonic body. This opens up creative potential for artists to explore questions of voice, agency, and authorship.

Veronika Muchitsch (2020) explored how voice in pop music is not simply an expression of a person’s inherent self but rather a product of cultural, technological, and performative processes. Muchitsch argues that the voice is shaped not just by the body but also by techniques such as breath control, pitch manipulation, and production choices. What we hear as “feminine” or “masculine” in a voice is not inherent; it is constructed, mediated, and crafted. Muchitsch’s concept of “vocal figurations” emphasizes that voices are not natural but are stylized and interpreted in ways that produce gendered meanings ^{(Muchitsch, 2020)}.

In 1960, Daphne Oram rewrote Sir Francis Bacon’s vision of sound houses in her text Atlantis Anew, which was recently published in Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear. Where Bacon’s sound houses imagined the disembodiment of voice in service of scientific mastery, Oram’s reinterpretation brings the body back into the frame, reconnecting sound with sensation, healing, and subjective experience. “We analyse each human being’s innate waveform,” she writes, proposing a mode of sonic inquiry that is not about detachment but about attunement. Through her pioneering work in sound synthesis and the Oramics machine, Oram recasts the sound house not as a cold site of control but as a space of embodied resonance, where sound becomes a medium of care, healing, and feminist listening.

It is in this context of experiments, voicing, and feminist thoughts that we aim to position our project to unlearn our existing habits and practices and transcend into new ones.