Zeynep Bulut

Zeynep Bulut is a Lecturer in Music at Queen’s University Belfast. Prior to joining Queen’s, she was an Early Career Lecturer in Music at King’s College London (2013-2017), and Research Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (2011-2013). She received her Ph.D. in Critical Studies/Experimental Practices in Music from the University of California at San Diego (2011), M.A. in Visual Arts Visual Communication Design from Sabanci University (2002) and B.A. in Sociology from Bogazici University, Istanbul (2000). She also studied opera in the State Conservatory of Mimar Sinan University (1996-1999), and ethnomusicology in MIAM (Centre for Advanced Studies in Music) at the Istanbul Technical University (2003-2005).

Situated in the fields of experimental music, voice and sound studies, Zeynep’s scholarly and creative work examines the emergence, embodiment and mediation of voice as skin. She is currently writing her first manuscript, titled, Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin. Her articles have appeared in various volumes and journals including Perspectives of New Music, Postmodern Culture, and Music and Politics. Alongside her scholarly work, she has also exhibited sound works, and composed and performed vocal pieces for concert, video and theatre.

Based on a particular aesthetics in contemporary classical music, which deconstructs the linguistic order of verbal language and which 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 theorize 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, as a physical and phenomenal matrix of senses, a primary point of contact and difference between self and the external world? 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.