Roshanak Kheshti is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the UC San Diego and the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU Press, 2015). She is currently writing a book on Wendy Carlos and the Moog synthesizer for the Bloomsbury 33 1/3 series.

“Roundtable: Verve and Fold: The Voice in Key(words)”
The voice is memorable and virulent in more ways than what it can record of the spoken word. Beyond Barthes’ grain, the voice is otherwise expository as it enters into a field of other constructions and events, methods and styles that are also available to interpretation. In order to distill this complex field, we’ve devised a roundtable of quick-fire keyword entries that take on some of the formidable sounds of our recent past and present, including the soaring fetes of Patti LaBelle and the technological extension of Wendy Carlos. Using a list of keywords, including vibration, harmony, and synthesized, the presentations will proceed as a continuous conversation in hopes of presenting a dynamic stream of consciousness that will detail the convergences and divergences of the voice and its approximation in the symphonic worlds of the late 20th and 21st century.