Addressing topics from the conceptual voice as political agency to the disembodied obedience of digital assistants like Alexa, from the evolution of vocal perception to the birth of black radical argument, chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies respond to the age-old question: What is voice?

More than two hundred years after the first speaking machine, we are accustomed to voices talking from seemingly anywhere and everywhere, including house alarm systems, cars, telephones, and digital assistants, or "smart speakers" such as Alexa and Google Home. However, vocal events still have the capacity to raise age-old questions regarding the human, the animal, the machine, and the spiritual-or in nonmetaphysical terms, questions about identity and authenticity. Individuals and groups perform, refuse, and play identity through vocal acts and by listening to and for voice. In this volume, leading scholars from multiple disciplines respond to the seemingly innocuous question: What is voice?

"The Oxford Handbook of Community Singing shows in abundant detail that singing with others is thriving. Using an array of interdisciplinary methods, chapter authors prioritize participation rather than performance and provide finely grained accounts of group singing in community, music therapy, religious, and music education settings. Themes associated with protest, incarceration, nation, hymnody, group bonding, identity, and inclusivity infuse the 47 chapters. Written almost wholly during the 2020-21 COVID-19 pandemic, the Handbook features a section dedicated to collective singing facilitated by audiovisual or communications media (mediated singing), some of it quarantine-mandated. The last of eight substantial sections is a repository of new theories about how group singing practices work. Throughout, the authors problematize the limitations inherited from the western European choral music tradition and report on workable new remedies to counter those constraints"--

Voice Studies brings together leading international scholars and practitioners, to re-examine what voice is, what voice does, and what we mean by "voice studies" in the process and experience of performance. This dynamic and interdisciplinary publication draws on a broad range of approaches, from composing and voice teaching through to psychoanalysis and philosophy, including: voice training from the Alexander Technique to practice-as-research; operatic and extended voices in early baroque and contemporary underwater singing; voices across cultures, from site-specific choral performance in Kentish mines and Australian sound art, to the laments of Kraho Indians, Korean pansori and Javanese wayang; voice, embodiment and gender in Robertson’s 1798 production of Phantasmagoria, Cathy Berberian radio show, and Romeo Castellucci’s theatre; perceiving voice as a composer, listener, or as eavesdropper; voice, technology and mobile apps. With contributions spanning six continents, the volume considers the processes of teaching or writing for voice, the performance of voice in theatre, live art, music, and on recordings, and the experience of voice in acoustic perception and research. It concludes with a multifaceted series of short provocations that simply revisit the core question of the whole volume: what is voice studies?

A source of profound insights into human existence and the nature of lived experience, phenomenology is among the most influential intellectual movements of the last hundred years. The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures brings ideas from the phenomenological tradition of Continental European philosophy into conversation with theoretical, ethnographic, and historical work from ethnomusicology, anthropology, sound studies, folklore studies, and allied disciplines to develop new perspectives on musical practices and auditory cultures. With sustained theoretical meditations and evocative ethnography, the book's twenty-two chapters advance scholarship on topics at the heart of the study of music and culture today--from embodiment, atmosphere, and Indigenous ontologies, to music's capacity to reveal new possibilities of the person, the nature of virtuosity, issues in research methods, the role of memory, imagination, and states of consciousness in musical experience, and beyond. Thoroughly up-to-date, the handbook engages with both classical and contemporary phenomenology, as well as theoretical traditions that have drawn from it, such as affect theory or the German-language literature on cultural techniques. Together, these essays make major contributions to fundamental theory in the study of music and culture.

Somatic Voices in Performance Research and Beyond brings together a community of international practitioner-researchers who explore voice through soma or soma through voice. Somatic methodologies offer research processes within a new area of vocal, somatic and performance praxis. Voice work and theoretical ideas emerge from dance, acting and performance training while they also move beyond commonly recognized somatics and performance processes. From philosophies and pedagogies to ethnic-racial and queer studies, this collection advances embodied aspects of voices, the multidisciplinary potentialities of somatic studies, vocal diversity and inclusion, somatic modes of sounding, listening and writing voice. Methodologies that can be found in this collection draw on: eastern traditions body psychotherapy-somatic psychology Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method Authentic Movement, Body-Mind Centering, Continuum Movement, Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy Fitzmaurice Voicework, Linklater Technique, Roy Hart Method post-Stanislavski and post-Grotowski actor-training traditions somaesthetics The volume also includes contributions by the founders of: Shin Somatics, Body and Earth, Voice Movement Integration SOMart, Somatic Acting Process This book is a polyphonic and multimodal compilation of experiential invitations to each reader’s own somatic voice. It culminates with the "voices" of contributing participants to a praxical symposium at East 15 Acting School in London (July 19–20, 2019). It fills a significant gap for scholars in the fields of voice studies, theatre studies, somatic studies, artistic research and pedagogy. It is also a vital read for graduate students, doctoral and postdoctoral researchers.

In Sensing Sound Nina Sun Eidsheim offers a vibrational theory of music that radically re-envisions how we think about sound, music, and listening. Eidsheim shows how sound, music, and listening are dynamic and contextually dependent, rather than being fixed, knowable, and constant. She uses twenty-first-century operas by Juliana Snapper, Meredith Monk, Christopher Cerrone, and Alba Triana as case studies to challenge common assumptions about sound—such as air being the default medium through which it travels—and to demonstrate the importance a performance's location and reception play in its contingency. By theorizing the voice as an object of knowledge and rejecting the notion of an a priori definition of sound, Eidsheim releases the voice from a constraining set of fixed concepts and meanings. In Eidsheim's theory, music consists of aural, tactile, spatial, physical, material, and vibrational sensations. This expanded definition of music as manifested through material and personal relations suggests that we are all connected to each other in and through sound. Sensing Sound will appeal to readers interested in sound studies, new musicology, contemporary opera, and performance studies.

The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical provides a comprehensive academic survey of British musical theatre offering both a historical account of the musical's development from 1728 and a range of in-depth critical analyses of the unique forms and features of British musicals, which explore the aesthetic values and sociocultural meanings of a tradition that initially gave rise to the American musical and later challenged its modern pre-eminence. After a consideration of how John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) created a prototype for eighteenth-century ballad opera, the book focuses on the use of song in early nineteenth century theatre, followed by a sociocultural analysis of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan; it then examines Edwardian and interwar musical comedies and revues as well as the impact of Rodgers and Hammerstein on the West End, before analysing the new forms of the postwar British musical from The Boy Friend (1953) to Oliver! (1960). One section of the book examines the contributions of key twentieth century figures including Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Joan Littlewood and producer Cameron Macintosh, while a number of essays discuss both mainstream and alternative musicals of the 1960s and 1970s and the influence of the pop industry on the creation of concept recordings such as Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and Les Misérables (1980). There is a consideration of "jukebox" musicals such as Mamma Mia! (1999), while essays on overtly political shows such as Billy Elliot (2005) are complemented by those on experimental musicals like Jerry Springer: the Opera (2003) and London Road (2011) and on the burgeoning of Black and Asian British musicals in both the West End and subsidized venues. The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical demonstrates not only the unique qualities of British musical theatre but also the vitality and variety of British musicals today.

Trying to understand the complex interplay between effective learning and personal experience is one of the main challenges for instrumental music education. Much of the research that focuses on effective learning outcomes often adopts experimental methodologies that do not allow for a thorough examination of the subjective and social processes that accompany each student's musical journey; on the contrary, contributions dedicated to the detailed analysis of the learners' lived experience often do not offer generalizable outcomes to different types of learning and teaching.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. The table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site.