What Wizardry is this?: Somatic Listening and Verbal Metaphor in an Undergraduate Voice Studio

ABSTRACT

Through the description of activity in an undergraduate voice studio, this essay posits the concept of somatic listening, an active and embodied engagement with verbal metaphor. Somatic listening, which includes aspects of multimodal and relational interlistening, opens singers’ mechanism to being moved by verbal metaphors suggested by their instructor or the text of their score. These movements are traceable through changes in a singer’s voice and in their embodied sensations.

KEYWORDS:

• Interlistening
• metaphor
• multimodal listening
• singing
• voice

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ This seemingly objective approach seems at odds with the subjective and often abstract ways rhetoricians consider voice. One of my greatest challenges in this fieldwork was trying to hold onto musicians’ functional understanding of voice, rather than drift toward the more comfortable rhetorical definitions.