Zeynep Bulut

Vita

Zeynep Bulut received her Ph.D. in Critical Studies/Experimental Practices in Music, from the University of California at San Diego in June 2011. Prior to her doctoral education, she studied sociology (B.A.), opera, and visual arts (M.F.A.) in Istanbul, Turkey. Analyzing contemporary classical and experimental music, Zeynep investigates the physical and phenomenal emergence of the human voice and its role in the constitution of the self. Her research engages readings in psychoanalysis, neuropsychology, speech science and kinesiology, existential phenomenology, philosophy of mind, ordinary language and action, and performance studies. Since 2003, Zeynep has presented papers in many academic conferences in the United States, Europe, Canada and Turkey, published scholarly articles, and composed and performed voice pieces for concerts, exhibits, and theatre. Most recently, her article “Theorizing Voice in Performance: György Ligeti’s Aventures” appeared in Perspectives of New Music, Volume 48, Winter 2010.

ICI-Project

Between Speech and Language: La Voix-Peau in Contemporary Music
Inspired by a particular aesthetics in contemporary music that destroys the linguistic order of verbal language and amplifies the unnoticed sounds of the human body, this project suggests a new conception of the human voice: “la voix-peau,” skin-voice. Drawing on French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu's notion of "le moi-peau," skin-ego, I analyze the human voice as the first tactile envelope, as skin. By this I mean the embodied sound, which stems from the whole body as well as the vocal folds. I examine the following questions: Can we situate the sensory and affective experiences of sound at the heart of the human voice? Can we conceive the voice as an assemblage of bodily sounds, and as a physical and phenomenal matrix of senses? Is it possible to appropriate such a designation of the voice for unsettling the discursive categories of language, speech and self? In light of these questions, skin-voice can be considered a potential space – a medium of constructive tension – that reveals the multiple facets of the self between speech and language. The aim is to investigate how our voices can communicate the self without being reduced to mediums for verbal language.