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Literature, Music, Voice, Technology
Researcher: Hazel Smith
This project focuses on a range of sonic/verbal intersections, and relationships between literature and music, in the growing field of musico-literary discourse. It examines the formal and semiotic relationships between literature and music, but is particularly concerned with the cultural hybridities—or literary-musico-miscegenations — created by such intersections, and the way they are changing concepts of the literary. Focusing on the contemporary scene, it includes work on new media writing, sound and affect; improvisation in contemporary poetry; formal/cultural eclecticism in the work of American jazz singer Kurt Elling; the performance poetry of Tracie Morris and the performance art of Pamela Z; the voice in computer music and its relationship to identity, place and community; and the representation of musical meaning, musical performance and musical communities in literary fiction, particularly Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music and Richard Powers’s A Time of Our Singing.
