The somaesthetic in-between: six statements on vocality, listening and embodiment

Drawing on Richard Shusterman’s pragmatist somatic philosophies developed in Body Consciousness (2008) and Thinking through the Body (2012), this chapter develops a framework of Somaesthetic Performance Analysis, transposing its principles to offer an analytical tool for Voice Studies, rooted in Western philosophical traditions. Exploring somaesthetics – with its focus on sensorial and embodied experience – I consider its usefulness in thinking about Voice Studies as a fruitful and provocative lens through which the effects and properties of vocal exchange in performance may be articulated. Constructing this framework, I offer six philosophical and theoretical statements discourses regarding the embodied voice drawing on the work of neurobiologist Antonio Damasio (2000), augmenting this consideration with specific reference to factors of cultural mediation and context, which in any case condition the ‘sensory experience’ one may allow themselves to feel. These scientific, biological and cultural theories will be employed as this analysis finds meaning in the transient and ephemeral ‘in-between’ in every voicing: the intangible space between voicing and listening that Erika Fisher-Lichte has conceived of with reference to the idea of the ‘feedback loop’ (2008), but which I argue is an explicitly somatic arena in the realm of the vocal and the aural.