Voice Laboratory

Voice Laboratory:

Exploring the voice across arts and sciences, linking practitioners and thinkers, in an interdisciplinary network. A space in which the voice is heard, mediated, echoed, added to, discussed, expanded, measured, compressed, multiplied, questioned and discovered.

The Voice laboratory is an interdisciplinary research cluster which is developing an intra and inter University ‘voice network’ led by composer, performer and visual artists

Amy Cunningham and Mikhail Karikis (University of Brighton) with colleagues across the faculty and from other academic institutions including composer, performer and visual artist Sam Belinfante, (Slade School of Fine Art, University College London), computer music composer and performer Nick Collins, (University of Sussex), composer, performer and sound artist Conall Gleeson (University of Brighton), mezzo-soprano singer Lore Lixenberg and composer Claudia Molitor. Other partners and communities include the contemporary experimental sound festival Soundwaves and ensemble Scratch the Surface.

The potential for interdisciplinary explorations on the subject of the voice offers a rich territory for research in which making, thinking and analysis are integrated and take equal importance. The Voice Laboratory aims to examine different disciplinary perspectives, knowledge and understanding of the voice, led from the arts and cultural perspectives and extended and tested by research from the perspectives of electronics, laryngology, psychology, acoustic design, and artificial intelligence.

The Voice Laboratory aims to:

• Establish an interdisciplinary network of voice practitioners and theorists across disciplines that will develop a research cluster that focuses on the emerging and contemporary discourse on voice.
• Nurture the current and future practices of researchers from undergraduate students to researchers and professional practitioners in fine art, performance, and science whose work is concerned with the voice.

Develop a sustainable centre for voice in which practical experiments across disciplines can be shared alongside and in conjunction with theoretical discourse, and with a view to collaboration across disciplines.

The Voice Laboratory is funded by the Research Innovation Award, University of Brighton.