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ABSTRACT
Although musicological work on opera had been focused until recently on the analysis and criticism of music and voice to the detriment of its visual aspects, the meeting of opera with digital media calls for renewed attention to the voice. New media theories advocating meaningful embodiment in mediated experiences make use of implicit analogies rhetorically to attribute the characteristics of sound to our perception of visual objects. Theories of immersion in media also call for renewed vigilance in our understanding of digital media as part of a larger digital industry. This article discusses epistemological negotiations of the voice: how the voice was turned into an image for eidetic knowledge and how imparting the attributes of this signified voice can give the illusion of meaningful embodiment in fictional scenarios of immersion in media. By focusing on the figure of Orpheus, it also calls into question how literature — in. the widest sense of the term — already. participates in this mediation. The last section offers a brief analysis of a recent digital opera by Manfred Stahnke and Simone de Mello, Orpheus Kristall (2002), by contextualizing it within the article's larger debates.