1

M U S I C ’ S M AT E R I A L D E P E N D E N C Y
What Underwater Opera Can Tell Us about Odysseus’s Ears

In space, nobody can hear you scream.—ALIEN (1979)

Prelude
In 2007, I received an invitation to a recital that would take place in my bath-
room. The Los Angeles–based soprano and performance artist Juliana Snapper,
a soprano and performance artist who works in experimental music, offered
to come to my home and present an underwater concert in my tub. “Crazy,”
I thought. “Why go to the trouble of singing in an element so far from ideal?”
Why choose a setting that would conjure up clichés from the Homeric sirens to
Disney’s The Little Mermaid? I declined the invitation, yet Snapper’s endeavor
lingered in my thoughts.

Introduction
Fundamental to Western notions of sound and music is the assumption that we
can know and recognize musical parameters. Indeed, these notions form the
basis of Western music’s classical analytical practice and, as I suggest through-
out this book, of the culture’s quotidian “audile techniques,” to evoke Jonathan
Sterne’s useful term.1 Even in contemporary works and studies, where tra-
ditional scores may not be relevant, dependence on sound waves, timelines,
FIGURE 1.1 • Juliana Snapper at the Aksioma Institute for Contemprary Art, Ljubljana,
Slovenia, June 20, 2008 (photo by Miha Fras; courtesy Aksioma, Ljublkana).

and algorithms maintains the traditional tendencies to quantify music. Conse-

quently, an abstract yet fixed notation, or a notation-derived notion of sound,
overshadows the actual, ever-shifting experience of music. In vocal studies,
this orientation plays out as a privileging of dramatic, structural, and semi-
otic content derived from documents (libretto, score, and contemporaneous
documents) and analyzed with attention to the sociohistorical context over
the distinct quality or timbre of each individual voice in each performance of
each work. Historically, Western music studies have favored the idealized and
abstract at the expense of the sensible, unrepeatable experience.
The common conception of the voice as a generic vehicle for words, pitches,
and durations arises from the same set of values. This notion results in the ne-
glect of key vocal and sonic dimensions that, traditionally, are not notated. By
considering the underwater singing practices of Snapper this chapter points
the way toward those aspects of music that are inaccessible to standard nota-
tion but available to all of our perceiving senses. Snapper’s work opens a win-
dow on the physical and sensory properties of singers’ and listeners’ bodies; on

28 • CHAPTER 1
the spaces and materials in which sound disperses; and on these aspects’ col-
lective indispensability to singing and listening as lived experiences. Because
sensory readings of singing and listening reach for dimensions of voice and
sound that are difficult if not impossible to account for with conventional ana-
lytical methods, multisensory perspectives can enrich the analysis of musical
sound in general, and vocal practices in particular.

Pushing the Limits of Voice and Body

Snapper’s work experiments with (or perhaps against) the limits of her voice
and body, challenging her physical abilities as well as her imagination.2 The
venues for her underwater operas range from bathtubs to Olympic-sized pools
(see figure 1.1). The works range from solo pieces and duets to large-scale pro-
ductions with choruses and dancers. Aquaopera was set for solo and duo per-
formances, all of which invited audience participation; Five Fathoms Deep My
Father Lies was modular in size, and ranged from solo performance with audi-
ence participation to performance with large-scale chorus and sound design
elements; and You Who Will Emerge from the Flood was composed for soloist, full
chorus, sound design, and keyboards.3
Snapper is a classically trained soprano, highly sought after by contempo-
rary composers of complex music. Despite her mastery of vocal nuance and her
success in the traditional music world, when it comes to her own vocal work,
Snapper’s main concern is the body and its mechanism and state; the sound is
secondary. Snapper represents the third generation of vocal experimentation
stemming from American classical music, part of a lineage of singer-composers
that includes Laurie Anderson, Cathy Berberian, Meredith Monk, and Joan La
Barbara (first generation); Shelly Hirsch, Diamanda Galás, Kristin Norderval,
and Pamela Z (second generation); and Amy X, Gelsey Bell, and Kate Soper
(third generation). Yet Snapper cites diverse influences such as comics like
Carol Burnett, the punk vocalist Nina Hagen, the seventeenth-century opera
singer and composer Barbara Strozzi, the composer and improviser George
Lewis, and the artist Kathy Acker.4 Additionally, in her nonsolo work—most
recently, her involvement in the Human Microphone Project, part of the
“Occupy Wall Street” protest movement—Snapper is intimately connected
with the American composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros, who, while
not a singer, has composed a large body of work for group vocal experience.
Oliveros’s work, which seeks to erase the distinctions between performer and
audience and between professional and amateur and to use “technology” (from
the human body to instrument building and modifications and musical soft-

Music’s Material Dependency • 29

FIGURE 1.2 • Ron Athey on the Judas cradle, May 5, 2005 (photo by Manuel Vason).
ware and hardware systems) to break down those boundaries, opened a num-
ber of paths for Snapper.5
A classical singer who had trained for most of her life to gain complete con-
trol of her voice, Snapper began a journey toward unsettling, questioning, and
challenging that foundation. By challenging sonorous traditions of opera, a
highly formalized vocal genre that rests on assumptions of decades-long prac-
tice leading to high levels of control, Snapper also questions the utility of other
areas of constraint. As I will discuss below, she questions the performance of
gender and sexuality and the limitations of language in the face of nonnorma-
tive behavior. Her investigation aims to complicate her performing relation-
ship with her instrument, her voice, by pulling the rug out from underneath
herself, so to speak, and implementing techniques that would undo her hard-
earned control.

Vocal Context and Influences

While these experimental practices seem to situate Snapper alongside com-
posers who work with extended vocal techniques, Snapper understands her
endeavor as a breakdown of technique rather than as its extension. She likens
the process of breaking down her instrument to the instrumental prepara-
tion investigated by experimental composers of the late twentieth century, in-
cluding John Cage, Oliveros, Annea Lockwood, and Cecil Taylor. To prepare a
piano or guitar in this sense is to distort the instrument’s capabilities by attach-
ing alien objects to it, causing the instrument to create new and distinctive
sounds. Similarly, Snapper distorts the sound of the operatic voice by penetrat-
ing, mutilating, or inhibiting the human body. For example, in The Judas Cradle
performances, Snapper’s vocal body is temporarily deformed by being tied up-
side down, while the anus of her collaborator, Ron Athey is penetrated by the
Judas cradle as his soul is entered by the Holy Spirit (see figure 1.2); in Five
Fathoms Deep My Father Lies, being underwater prevents Snapper from draw-
ing breath. As a practice, preparation evidences both a curiosity and adventur-
ousness about sound and a desire to interrupt and disturb human relationships
with instruments and their histories. We might also imagine Snapper’s vocal
preparation as a way to remark on, negotiate, and play with the boundaries be-
tween nature and culture: between the female voice historically understood
as uncontrollable or natural, and the operatic voice as refined and controlled.6
To offer a snapshot of Snapper’s forerunners: La Barbara explores voice as
an instrument; the celebrated Berberian, classically trained but often inspired
by popular culture, investigates the voice’s sonic range; Monk attempts to ac-

Music’s Material Dependency • 31

cess the sonic space of the prelinguistic voice; and Galás scrutinizes the sounds
of psychic space. Anderson is a composer with roots in a storytelling tradition.
Her vocal work relies on techniques and effects enabled by microphones. In
contrast to Galás, for example, who uses microphones to compositional ends,
Anderson’s vocal sonority is made possible by a close-miking technique. Galás
also makes good use of the microphone and its ability to capture her voice,
using a variety of microphones at once and processing each of their signals
differently, but her basic vocal techniques do not seem to have resulted from
microphone usage. In the same way, while Snapper makes use of microphones,
her voice does not change when she sings with one (this is a fairly typical trait
of classical singers).
Among Snapper’s interlocutors are Z and Norderval. Z’s work is completely
dependent on microphones. Her trademark sonority comes from live sampling
and playback supported by her interface system, the VocalSynth. With what
appears to be a flick of her hand in the air, she layers voice and other sound
samples. Z’s work is also heavily based in storytelling. Her sound combines
close-miked spoken voice with a sonority that resembles the classical vocal
aesthetic (she employs a lifted soft palate, but not to the same extent as exclu-
sively classical singers like Snapper). Norderval is a classically trained singer
and composer who, like Z, uses custom-made technological systems to deploy
vocal samples.7 Both Z and Norderval make innovative use of technology to ex-
pand classical compositional and vocal techniques.
There are many more experimental singers of note, but those I have men-
tioned collectively form the orbit within which Snapper finds herself. Her
work clearly emerges from this particular tradition of American vocal ex-
ploration—she even shared a teacher (the soprano Carol Plantamura) with
Galás—yet her contribution to the contemporary vocal repertoire is distinct.
While many of today’s most innovative musical ventures, some of which are
cited above, rely on digital technologies, Snapper has collaborated with the
pioneering computer musician Miller Puckette, and her explorations engage
corporeal, organic, and architectural technologies. Her work is concerned
with the dynamic relationship between control and its loss—sonically, cor-
poreally, and socially—and she investigates her material of choice through
that preoccupation. Considered through the lens of performance art, in which
Athey and many of Snapper’s other collaborators participate (artists such as
Paula Cronan, Elena Mann, Sean Griffin, Andrew Infanti, and Jeanine Ole-
son), Snapper’s work may be heard in conversation with body art, specifically
with art that modifies the body. Her work engages the body as both an instru-
ment and a disruptive appropriation of culture. In the latter regard, the work

32 • CHAPTER 1
resembles that of Marina Abramović, Vaginal Creme Davis, Karen Finley, and
Annie Sprinkle.
Furthermore, beyond the obvious parallel of the marine environment,
Snapper’s work has much in common with that of other late twentieth-century
composers who have explored the sonic possibilities of aquatics.8 The com-
posers whose work I believe Snapper’s most resembles are not those who fore-
ground the sounds of water, but rather those who work with sound in water.9
Major composers who deal with the acoustic environment offered by water
include Cage with Lou Harrison (Double Music, 1941), Max Neuhaus (Whistle
Music, 1971), and Michel Redolfi (various works, 1981–present).10 With Cage
and Harrison, Snapper shares the notion of changing the sounds of a familiar
source by immersing the sound source in water. With Neuhaus, she shares the
desire to eject music from concert spaces and institutions and to showcase the
sonorous possibilities of traditionally nonmusical environments. And with Re-
dolfi, Snapper shares a fascination with adapting instruments, performers, and
listeners to an aquatic medium. Nevertheless, to my knowledge, Snapper is the
first to concentrate on singing underwater.11 Of Redolfi’s approximately two
hundred underwater pieces, for which he has tried to perfect various custom-
built instruments (mostly based on percussive principles), only one piece was
created for a soprano. But whereas Redolfi is disturbed by the bubbles that
escape from air-based instruments underwater, and therefore avoids such in-
struments altogether, for Snapper causing bubbles is part of the performative
experience.12 For her the idiosyncratic sounds of bursting bubbles, and the
acoustic information those sounds offer about the bubbles’ physical proper-
ties, form aspects of the music. Performing in an unfamiliar element forces
the vocalist to confront the processes involved in singing on the most funda-
mental level: How do I get air? Do I emit the sound from my mouth or vibrate
it through my bones into the water? How can I share the sound with my audi-
ence? Snapper addressed these questions through trial and error.
Prior to Snapper’s underwater opera work, scholars (many of whom have
influenced her) described a sensory complex that would accommodate addi-
tional registers of sound, voice, and the experience of listening. As we will see,
this idea is often described as a difficult experience to capture in words or is
expressed in terms of how it breaks with the normative way of understanding
these musical moments. Roland Barthes insists that the voice has the capacity
to operate outside the dependency of the semiotic sphere. With his landmark
text, “The Grain of the Voice,” he hints at sound’s occupation of the tactile
domain.13 This entails a shift of emphasis from adjectives to verbs in the dis-
cussion of sound, as Christopher Small demonstrates.14 Similarly, but arising

Music’s Material Dependency • 33

from a different impetus, Suzanne Cusick mobilizes the notion of performa-
tivity in her suggestion that culture works its way “deep in the throat,” and that
certain vocal styles arise from the body’s relationship to culture.15 Thus, as
Carolyn Abbate suggests, knowledge gained from hermeneutic analysis, while
not completely divorced from the experience, can be completely contradicted
by a given performance, or rendered irrelevant when a performer “offers up
his body.”16 Steven Connor reminds us that the voice and ears are part of a
multisensorial bodily landscape in which the transfer of experience from one
sense to another (say, from hearing to touch) is natural and unavoidable—for
example, one can even experience sound by biting on a vibrating rod.17 That is,
while Snapper’s work is unusual in its clarity and heuristic, we see that schol-
ars and artists never cease to grapple with the intersensorial aspects of sound.

Flood and Rapture

Snapper began her Five Fathoms Opera Project, “a series of modular, site-
specific operatic performances,” in response to an environmental disaster,
which had been met with reactions ranging from apoplectic to indifferent.18
Watching Hurricane Katrina on television from the West Coast of the United
States, Snapper bore horrified witness to an emerging awareness of our chang-
ing climate, as fear of flooding and drought turned to a full-fledged politics of
disaster. She watched Evangelical Christians absorb climate change into their
idea of the rapture: the biblical end of time in the form of melting glaciers and
rising sea levels. The Judeo-Christian perspective is predisposed toward a lin-
ear sense of time and the progressive inevitability of events. The end of the
world is thus inexorable and often depicted as an uncontrollable flood—not
as a gateway to cleansing and renewal, as with the flood of Noah’s Ark, but
as an eternal doom, an irreversible watery state. The element from which we
ascended billions of years ago and that we depend on for survival, enjoy in
recreation, and use as a means of transportation is also the unstoppable pun-
ishment that will obliterate humanity from the earth. Therefore, even as scien-
tists search for clues about the beginnings of civilization, others predict the
end of time, wondering: What are the signs? What deeds might trigger events
of such magnitude? And how should we act when we are faced with the rap-
ture? Snapper’s practice questions the relationship between a progressive tra-
jectory and the events that can be read as propelling it forward. For example,
when a linear narrative is set in motion, she asks whether it is not a centrifugal
force surrounding this narrative’s trajectory that pulls events into it, to be read
as its confirmation, rather than the events themselves causing the end time to

34 • CHAPTER 1
draw nearer. Specifically, when homosexual practice is understood as causing
a flood, the two are erroneously linked through a narrative, rather than causal
factuality.19
Outraged by the uncommon, yet brazenly articulated, views of the suppos-
edly inevitable suffering wrought by Katrina, and appalled at the inertia of the
unaffected populace who—dry and warm in their living rooms—watched the
flood unfolding, Snapper began to reflect on water’s relationship with society,
leading her to ask whether people had lost touch with water, its potential, and
what it represents. Were they numbed by a media culture that profited from
fear? Had they been pulled apart by each episode of paralyzing dread? “I think
we need to take [opera] out of the opera house and bring bodies together. It
can work against that separating damage,” was Snapper’s eventual response to
these questions. She continued by describing her hope that opera, if ejected
from the opera house and steeped in water, could infuse souls:

The idea that water [always] represents emotions in some fundamental

way is all over our language. The idea of being flooded with emotion, or
storms of rage, or raining tears. It’s very raw. [Water is a] technology that
gets people feeling in a new way. My hope is to use that technology in a
way that is more fresh and more immediate and really actually can work
on people listening—which I think less and less happens in the opera
house. . . . Maybe opera can help us to bind in new ways, to feel what
we’re feeling.20

Because water can represent extreme emotion, Snapper believes that to con-
nect with water is to enhance our engagement with our feelings. She views
underwater singing as a way to address a society distanced from itself and from
emotion, paralyzed by the prospect of the end of time. Additionally, for Snap-
per, singing underwater is an adaptive strategy for basic and artistic postapoca-
lyptic survival. She wonders if instead of accepting watery engulfment as the
conclusion of our story, could one adapt to this new state? Snapper says: “I am
interested in what it means to accept the end of things—instead of trying to
keep things that are dear to us alive at any cost.”21 Thus, the Five Fathoms Opera
Project, of which there are several versions, was born from the idea of adapting
singing to the condition of the end of time and, through this adaptation, defy-
ing the end of time envisioned by a minority of Christian leaders.

Music’s Material Dependency • 35

Spilling the Truth
Several striking elements indicate a continuum between Snapper’s Judas Cradle
and Five Fathoms Opera Project (hereafter Five Fathoms). The unusual vocaliza-
tions that characterize both pieces arise from severe corporeal transforma-
tions. In The Judas Cradle, Athey’s glossolalia spills out of him because God’s
presence has overtaken his body, and Snapper’s trained voice breaks because
she is hanging upside down.22 In Five Fathoms Snapper’s entire vocal repertoire
and sonority are transformed by her aquatic immersion. Whether they are uti-
lizing glossolalia in a queer masochistic performance, breaking the body to
break through operatic training, or defying the end of time by learning how
to sing under water, Snapper and Athey play with subverting regimes of body
and mind not by escaping or averting them but by facing them to pervert them.
Both pieces are extreme responses to various manifestations of control
exerted through terror. The Judas Cradle was a medieval European torture de-
vice, a pyramid-shaped apparatus onto which victims were lowered for pene-
tration inflicted by their own body weight (see figure 1.2). Five Fathoms is also a
response to horrific events. The title of the project, Five Fathoms, and one of the
variations, additionally titled You Who Will Emerge from the Flood, combines an
adaptation of a Shakespearean song—sung by the spirit Ariel to a shipwrecked
prince in The Tempest—and a quote from Berthold Brecht’s poem trio, An die
Nachgeborenen (To Those Born Later) (1938).23 Set to music by Hanns Eisler in
1984, Brecht’s poem is addressed to survivors of world-annihilating tragedy,
asking them to remember with understanding those who caused the tragedy.
(Eisler’s song is performed twice during Five Fathoms.)
Furthermore, the pieces subvert dominant narratives that significantly in-
fluence how the world appears to be configured. In Five Fathoms Snapper im-
plies that even after the flood that Judeo-Christianity promised would destroy
the world, humans can find the strength to survive and even to make music. In
The Judas Cradle, as even the costumes indicate, she exaggerates conventional
Western narratives of male and female sexuality to demonstrate how those
narratives demand cruel and impossible confinements of the human body.
Moreover, there are unavoidable parallels between the Judas Cradle and the
similarly antique no-touch torture technique of waterboarding. The latter was
frequently discussed in the early twenty-first century, as the U.S. government’s
antiterrorist program used waterboarding to obtain confessions. Five Fath-
oms is also a response to Judeo-Christian tales of the ultimate punishment—
annihilation. The masochistic aspects of The Judas Cradle draw on a long his-

36 • CHAPTER 1
tory of Christian martyrdom, in which we find references to Jesus’s hanging,
pierced, and dismembered body.
Perhaps hoping to shed the undesirable trappings of her inherited Judeo-
Christian culture, in The Judas Cradle and Five Fathoms Snapper forcibly di-
vorces herself from the hyperbolic discipline of the operatic body—although
it was not easy. She found that “the operatic instrument is actually incredibly
tough” and difficult to disturb. “I started really delving into this idea of the
prepared body with Ron [Athey],” says Snapper, recalling their collaborative
2005–2007 explorations that would culminate in The Judas Cradle: “We had
a hell of a time trying to get my voice to break down under stress. We had me
folding over jungle gym bars and contorting every which way before discover-
ing that hanging upside down, with a slight arch to the back, will undo the
vocal mechanism over the course of several minutes”24 (see figure 1.3).
Through rigorous experimentation Snapper located the point at which she,
as a singer, lost control, allowing her voice to take over as an autonomous,
driven, and determined entity. Her own voice hastened her to places where her
knowledge of singing and her artistic imagination could not take her. In other
words, she discovered that allowing the physicality of her instrument, rather
than prewritten instructions or preconceived ideas, to dictate the sound of her
performance led her to new possibilities.
Opera, along with ballet, is arguably one of the most extreme arts, and it in-
volves the “regimentation of the female body to attain an ideal.”25 By imposing
additional challenges—such as hanging upside down or singing underwater—
while still exhibiting mastery over the operatic idiom, Snapper questions the
logic of the rules of bodily dominance set by operatic and balletic traditions
and exposes their limits. Thus, by extension, she also questions the perfor-
mance and practice of the female body, the female voice, and bodies within
erotic acts and fantasies. And while in The Judas Cradle both performing and lis-
tening bodies are sonically, physically, and metaphorically penetrated through,
in Amelia Jones’s words, a “(masochistic) enactment of pain,” the setting of Five
Fathoms enacts the ultimate cradle, the embrace of oceanic depths, celebrated
and feared since the dawn of history.26
Notably, in many Western myths the ocean is personified by the mutated
female forms of sirens and mermaids.27 Thus, in a connection to which I will
return below, the flood—the apocalypse—is associated with the female in
Western mythology. Snapper knows that her work will unavoidably be received
within such contexts, so she deliberately alludes to the multiple penetrations of
the female/oceanic body that enable it to absorb and exude sound.

Music’s Material Dependency • 37

FIGURE 1.3 • Juliana Snapper singing upside down in The Judas Cradle, May 5, 2005
(photo by Manuel Vason).
Situating Snapper’s Five Fathoms Deep Opera Project
Despite Snapper’s breakdown of her instrument in pursuit of new sonorities,
at the core of her work is a committed, if fraught, relationship to operatic tech-
niques, aesthetics, and institutions. Says Snapper: “It is an amazing feeling to
sing operatically. All of this power gushing from your center! I trust it beyond
any other means of communication. It is totalizing, erotic, uncanny. Every part
of you is active, your insides are turned out. That’s why I center my work within
operatic singing . . . and explore the limits of the voice by directly addressing
my body.”28
To Snapper there is nothing more uncanny than operatic vocal technique,
except possibly operatic form. In fact, the uncanny and fantastical are central
to Snapper’s practice: she metaphorically juxtaposes opera, arguably the most
artificial of vocal forms, with dolphins’ and whales’ sonorous underwater com-
munications, often used as examples of ancient forms of communication.29
In this relationship, it is important for Snapper that she never becomes com-
fortable with singing in her newly chosen element, whether upside down or
underwater. Not only the uncanny and fantastical, but also the states of dis-
comfort and uncertainty of vocal outcome, suggest something extraordinary.
It is an exciting but uncertain situation that keeps one at the edge and does
not permit taking the environment and its rules for granted. To Snapper, the
fantastical aspects of the operatic vocal sound and form, the newness of the
elements she introduces, and the consequent uncertainty renders the oper-
atic medium transformative: “I like struggling with a mastery that is no longer
fully relevant (bel canto) and having to transform it into something else again
and again. Singing underwater is still the most physically demanding because
there are serious dangers attached to it—like bursting a lung or drowning [only
three teaspoons of water in the lungs will do it]. Plus it just takes more energy
to expel sound into water because it is so dense. But singing upside down was
emotionally taxing. Maybe because your heart and head fill with blood, or for
the way that failure happens gradually.”30
Snapper sees herself as extending and dialoging with the operatic form, as
part of its monodramatic lineage; she views her work as a continuation of the
single-character tradition. In her scholarship she identifies Arnold Schoen-
berg’s Erwartung (1909) as the predecessor of single-voice dramatic works,
such as Francis Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine (1958), Peter Maxwell Davies’s The
Medium (1981), and Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian’s Visage (1961).31 In the
interest of exploring media and sonorities, these monodramas were carried

Music’s Material Dependency • 39

out as both live performances and taped pieces, in all of which the feminine
body acts out madness operatically. Although these works most often feature
women, the mad figure might also be a feminine man, or a man rendered ef-
feminate by his madness—as exemplified in Davies’s 8 Songs for a Mad King and
Julius Eastman’s Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (both 1981).32
Snapper calls this repertoire “hysterical” because of the extreme extent to
which it “re-arranges the body of the singer” in ways that affect vocal quality.33
This rearrangement “extends outward from [the performer’s] body,” affecting
the other musicians’ and the audience’s empathetic bodies, “rearranging” our
ingrained notions of music as an ineffable experience. Just as we may be lulled
into believing that we are completely disconnected from the suffering that
we watch from the comfort of our homes, so we can persuade ourselves that
music, fleeting and seemingly intangible, has no lasting consequences. Snap-
per attempts to rearrange these beliefs through what she calls “hystericism,”
alluding not to an illness—like the hysteria historically assigned to women
who did not align their behavior with prescribed gender roles—but to an ap-
proach to technique that deliberately harnesses physical responses to terror
through music drama.34 Snapper says she coined the term hystericism to de-
scribe “a non- or truly anti-discursive mode of vocal performance capable
of transmitting things [that] symbolic systems (language, narrative, musical
rhetoric) cannot.”35 While her performances are not about hystericism, her
objective is to “harness the technology of hystericism to redirect the kinds of
energy that propagate a growing culture of fear.”36
Through hystericism, Snapper addresses how women are silenced, pre-
vented from using their voices in ways that seem proper and natural to them,
the ways this silencing plays out in emotionally lonely places, and her experi-
ences as a woman with a fundamental distrust of language. After Snapper lost
the ability to speak for a period of weeks at age nineteen, her relationship
to verbal discourse and to social expectations grounded in language became
deeply distrustful. While she could articulate words during this period, she
could not form sentences or sing lyrics. Naturally this resulted in an inability
to explain herself (and how can a nineteen-year-old explain that she has sud-
denly lost her grasp of language?). Though she attempted to communicate with
her eyes and nonverbal sounds, she loathed the powerlessness that came with
being half-mute. Snapper views her vocal compositions as reactions to her own
abandonment by language and uncertainty in relation to the voice. Retreating
from the everyday tool of language that temporarily abandoned her, Snapper’s
work restages situations of uncertainty, discomfort, and reaches for the un-
canny and fantastical.

40 • CHAPTER 1
Singing Underwater
As she gradually adjusts to new self-imposed linguistic and physical con-
straints, Snapper’s practice in the Five Fathoms Deep Opera Project involves con-
tinually pushing her body toward moments of surprise. She first experimented
at home, in the bathtub; her first performances, too, were in tubs. “Once I got
the hang of . . . well, I am still getting the hang of it,” Snapper notes, “I started
working with movement, different depths, different apertures” before moving
into larger pools of water (see figures 1.4–1.6).37 When Snapper described her
process to me, we agreed that the best way for her to demonstrate being over-
whelmed by a new environment was to take me through a comparable experi-
ence. So in 2010, I took a group of graduate students to the Standard Hotel in
downtown Los Angeles. We gathered in the rooftop bar, one of Snapper’s many
performance venues, which featured fire-truck-red waterbeds and a large salt-
water swimming pool.
Once we were in the water, Snapper took us through some participatory
activities. The first had us form pairs; one person gently held the other under-
water, while the person underwater made sounds (see figure 1.7). I was paired
with Natalia Bieletto, who shouted—but with my ears above water I didn’t
hear her voice.38 We tried another strategy: one person made sounds under-
water while the rest of us put our heads and ears in, enabling us to hear him.
We found that the deeper into the water we descended, the more difficult it
was to sing high notes. Fast tempi were also difficult to maintain; Bieletto’s at-
tempt resulted in muddled sounds. Surprisingly, while sung sounds generally
didn’t seem very loud, small internal throat sounds were incredibly powerful.
They boomed, beamed, and spread and were almost overbearing. These exer-
cises demonstrate the extent to which the medium in which sound waves flow
affects their characteristics: their speed, direction, and so on. It also shows that
to register sound, the listening body, including the head, must be immersed in
the material through which the sound flows.
The next exercise linked the six of us together by the arms: three partici-
pants stood in a line, with their backs against those of the other three. We sang
in a drone-like manner, playing with our voices above the water, at its surface,
and slowly descending into it. We felt the sonic vibrations largely through di-
rect contact with each other’s bodies. Of course sound also passed through the
air and the water, but because the most immediate path was from one body to
another: this was the sensation that overpowered us.
As we ended the day by gathering around the poolside fireplace, we dis-
cussed how taken we were with singing’s different feel in a liquid environment.

Music’s Material Dependency • 41

FIGURES 1.4–1.5 • Above, top: Juliana Snapper singing in a bathtub (photo by Miles
Rosesmire). Above: Juliana Snapper in Five Fathoms Deep My Father Lies in a tank at
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA, New York City, March 15, 2008 (photo by
Marina Ancona).
FIGURE 1.6 • Juliana Snapper in You Who Will Emerge from the Flood with João Tavares
da Rocha and Hugo Veludo in an Olympic size pool, Porto, Portugal, October 10, 2009
(photo by Silvana Torrinha).
FIGURE 1.7 • The author (right) with Natalia Bieletto (left, under water), participating
in Aquaopera #5/Los Angeles, April 28, 2010 (photo by Jillian Rogers).

Although some of us were singers with decades of training, we felt that little of
our experience could effectively apply or even seem relevant underwater. We
found that aural experience is predicated on our physical contact with sound
waves through shared media—in this case water and air, flesh and bone. We
noted that the shared medium makes a great deal of difference to how we ex-
perience the voice, and that the sound ultimately heard depends partly on what
is sung, partly on the medium through which it passes, and partly on how our
bodies interact with that medium. Connor’s engagement with Michel Serres’s
work came to mind. “For Serres,” Connor writes, “the body itself is caught up
in a process of hearing, which implicates skin, bone, skull, feet and muscle.
Just when we thought hearing was going to be put in its place, Serres evokes
its own mingled or implicated nature.”39
In other words, in Snapper’s workshop we experienced what we already

44 • CHAPTER 1
knew in theory. And although we had prior theoretical knowledge, we felt as
though we had discovered that sound is a multisensory experience, tactile as
well as aural. Snapper’s exercises revealed that music making involves more
than traditional theories and notation can capture, and even more than what
current musical discourse can describe.

The Sensing Body in Relation to the Material World

Singing in water sounds so different from the way it sounds in air largely be-
cause, unlike electromagnetic waves of light, mechanical waves of sound re-
quire a medium through which to propagate. Consequently sound cannot
travel through a vacuum.40 Hence the speed at which sound waves travel de-
pends on the density and compressibility of the medium through which they
pass. Because higher densities and compressions engender slower speeds—
and relative to air, water is very dense but nearly incompressible—the speed
of sound in water is generally about four times faster than the speed of sound
in air, with slight variations depending on several factors. These factors in-
clude water quality (distilled or salted, warm or cool) and hydrostatic pressure
(which depends in turn on the distance below the surface at which an ob-
ject sounds).41 This is partly why Bieletto’s up-tempo tune sounded muddled
underwater, and why Snapper chooses slower tempi for underwater music
than for the same music sung in air.
The specific relationship between our material bodies and the materials in
which we immerse ourselves also affects how we experience sounds. In its un-
familiarity, listening underwater brings the relationship between sound, mat-
ter, and eardrum—which, in air, we take for granted—into relief. Because the
density of human tissue is very similar to that of water, the eardrum does not
provide the resistance necessary to translate underwater vibrations into tym-
panic movements—that is, into sound that eardrums can register. Thus, when
we listen underwater, many vibrations pass through our eardrums without reg-
istering as sound. It is precisely because our skull bones are dense enough to
convey the sound that those bones, rather than the eardrums, capture most
of the sounds that humans do manage to register underwater. As a result the
sound resonates in the body, going directly to the inner ear and circumvent-
ing the eardrum. Like air and water, the eardrum and skull bones are media
through which sound passes, and by which its character is affected.
Bone-conduction theory explains that sound signals reach the inner ear not
only via the eardrum’s ossicle path, but also via the bone-conduction path.42
Bone conduction can take place via air conduction, in underwater hearing,

Music’s Material Dependency • 45

or through stimuli that set the body directly into vibration. While the early
twentieth-century hypothesis that bone conduction is a crucial aspect of nor-
mative spatial hearing is no longer widely accepted, the German psychoacousti-
cian Jens Blauert points out that when the sound component that reaches the
inner ear is similar in strength to air-conducted sound, bone conduction does
play a significant role. Examples of when sound can reach the inner ear with a
strength similar to air-conducted sound include the use of ear protectors and
the immersion of the body in a medium with a field impedance similar to its
own—for example, water.43 Favorable conditions for underwater hearing are
enabled by the similarity in acoustic field impedance between water and the
skull.44
The specific part of the body that registers sound also plays a role in its ap-
parent directionality. For example, our ability to hear in stereo—two distinct
signals, left and right—is the result of sound entering our bodies from two di-
rections (through two ears). In contrast, when the inner ear registers sound via
the skull bones, rather than with the left and right eardrums, the sound seems
to be omnidirectional.45 Because the sound waves vibrate the bones of the lis-
tener’s body, her perception is that her own body has created the sound. The
sound becomes a state or quality of the listener’s body—in Stefan Helmreich’s
description, a “soundstate.”46 In effect, at an underwater performance where
the audience and performers are immersed, the singer’s body, the water, and
the audiences’ bodies connect through vibration to become one mass, a single
pulsating speaker.47
The multiple iterations of Five Fathoms transmit sound along very different
nodes. The paths of propagation depend on whether the audience is immersed
in the water with Snapper or seated on bleachers by the pool. For example,
in the 2011 Geneva performance of You Who Will Emerge from the Flood, when
audience members sat on bleachers, they were not only removed from Snap-
per at a greater distance than was the case in the water-immersed mode, but
also the number of transmissional nodes between Snapper and the audience
increased, differing between sections of the piece. At various points Snapper’s
voice was emitted into air, water, a traditional microphone, and an underwater
microphone. From these various nodes, her voice would be transduced (1) via
air to eardrums; (2) via water to air—where most of the energy is lost and not
transmitted—to eardrum; (3) via air to microphone to amplifier, speakers, air,
and eardrums; and (4) from water to underwater microphone to amplifier,
speaker, air, and eardrums.48
The contrasting propagations resulted in four distinct characters that en-
gendered four distinct sounds and could potentially be understood as four dif-

46 • CHAPTER 1
ferent voices. While, needless to say, throughout these different transmissions
the sound is sensed beyond traditional eardrum-based audition, it is the un-
usual situation of having different material afforded sensory experiences of the
same musical segments that allows us to grasp that the identification of a musi-
cal piece is materially specific and dependent. Because so many discursive re-
sources have been put into controlling and repressing the material, multisen-
sory aspects of sound, we have stopped accounting for these aspects. But it
seems that in limited cases, such as immersing ourselves in water with an opera
singer, we can sense beyond the strong naturalization of our sensing of sound.
Musical practices that extend beyond normative perception tend to be mar-
ginalized as exceptional or as functional. But does it actually matter whether
Snapper’s work is framed as opera as opposed to, say, music therapy? That is,
does Snapper’s work reveal anything different from the revelations offered by
practices that yield similar experiences, but that are framed as music therapy
or alternative healing practices?
In summary, because musical discourse is in large part aesthetic, and only
selectively engages with knowledge of sound gained in other fields, there is an
unexpected twist to this story: the most important and revealing part of Snap-
per’s work is not her need to develop a strategy for singing underwater, but
that she sings underwater, deals in vibration, and still considers it opera. In
that way knowledge about sound’s propagation underwater and its particular
material relationship to the body must be dealt with as it is articulated within a
piece of music—as opposed to, for example, situations in music therapy, sound
engineering, or medicine. Snapper performs in opposition to traditional con-
ceptions of sound and music while working within traditions. Her insistence
on defining her own creative collaborations as opera, and her legitimacy as an
opera singer through her training and performance of more traditional reper-
toire, manage to keep what are considered extreme vocal articulations within
the aesthetic. Thus, she opens up a space to think about aspects of sound and
music that previously have been considered too liminal to have anything to say
about music. Snapper’s feat, then, is to offer extreme vocal articulations while
managing to maintain her practice within a tradition-bound form of music
such as opera. In so doing, she exposes the limitations of music analysis, an
analytical framework that assumes that sound is propagated through air.

The Lived Body

In the midst of a crisis caused by the constraints of gendered and sexual life,
during which the speech that supposedly reflects the vast range of human

Music’s Material Dependency • 47

inner life was unable to communicate and describe it, we remember, Snapper
lost her ability to use language. Her reaction and response to societal, cultural,
and musical control involved devising incredibly difficult situations (singing
upside down, singing underwater, and so on), challenging herself to master
them within a demanding vocal tradition such as opera. By overcoming these
impossible situations, she effectively breaks the narrative arches around gen-
der, sexuality, and verbal communication that had trapped her. She upsets the
conventional wisdom that dictates the forms of vocal communication by de-
ciding where opera ought to take place. She directly questions both the idea of
inevitability that a rigid, linear sense of time sets in motion and the tendency
to slot events and even people into this notion of time and its progress. For me,
a close reading of Snapper’s work and practice has impelled an examination of
those dimensions of sound that musicologists have not traditionally considered
in earnest, such as materiality and its multisensory dimension. This examina-
tion in turn throws other inevitability narratives into question.
This type of analysis asks the subject to take leave of his or her absolute sov-
ereignty and to acknowledge that he or she is both subject and object in the
world, subject to material forces over which the mind and body do not have
control. Following Shoshana Felman and Judith Butler, Michelle Duncan sug-
gests that the “very ‘scandal’ revealed by psychoanalysis . . . propose[s] that the
speech act undoes meaning, that it disrupts intentional knowledge through a
bodily act,” and that the nonlinguistic and nonreferential sound of the voice
can move us to affect and action.49 Wayne Koestenbaum shares how divas’
vibrating voices worked on his consciousness via his bodily tissue in ways that
were foundational to his budding awareness of his queer identity.50 Accounts
such as these, exploiting normative listening practices, are poignant examples
of listening and thinking about listening beyond established paradigms, adapt-
ing Thomas Csordas’s use of the term. That is, they describe instances of a
new and “consistent methodological perspective that encourages re-analyses
of existing data and suggests new questions for empirical research.”51
“To be present in the world,” writes Simone de Beauvoir, “implies strictly
that there exists a body which is at once a material thing in the world and a
point of view towards the world.”52 Beauvoir recognized that it is impossible
to locate a body outside its performative representation of culture. In other
words, she recognized that material in a natural state is a phantasm to which
we do not have unmediated access. Rather, the materiality that we can ac-
cess—which includes sound and the voice—is determined by ideas and rep-
resentations that are unavoidably subject to power relations. The power re-
lationship that we have seen play out in music analysis has pulled the eye and

48 • CHAPTER 1
ear above the other senses, out of the full sensory experience that is listening
to voice and sound.53
In a response to feminist scholarship’s debate about materiality, performa-
tivity, and nature in relation to the question of sex and gender, Toril Moi offers
the image of the lived body (replacing categories of both sex and gender) as a
means of illustrating the involvement of our bodily characteristics in the for-
mation of a lived sense of ourselves.54 This lived body is embedded in and sub-
ject to cultural forces at a foundational level. And it is this body, with a percep-
tual system tuned by a given culture, that is the perceiving conduit of sound.
Quite strikingly, through her practice Snapper also addresses the possibility or
impossibility of experiencing outside or beyond the situated sensorium. If she
does not fully present the body with a new sensory complex by exposing it to
situations such as singing underwater, which transcend the dominant narra-
tives and rules, at the very least she questions whether the current narrative is
entirely waterproof.
By descending into water with excessive performative expressions, cos-
tumes, set designs, and vocal sounds, and by inviting her audience to accom-
pany her, Snapper confronts the pervasive cross-cultural ambivalence about
the female body head-on. She challenges notions of this body’s dangerous
ambiguity, notions that have survived across geographies and cultures for mil-
lennia in stories of sirens’ and mermaids’ seductive, enveloping voices. More-
over, the idea of the underwater female body and its material form symbolize,
literally and figuratively, the feminine embrace and the allure of all humans’
complete dependency on a woman’s body while in utero.55 Snapper’s perfor-
mance points to inconsistencies in the stories we are told about how the world
works, and it defies the rules surrounding vocal performance and operatic
practice. From her work we have learned that (1) sound does not exist in a vac-
uum but is materially dependent. Therefore, (2) the transmitting medium (for
example, water versus air) and the combination of different materialities (such
as the body in relation to water versus air) affect the sound’s propagation and
hence its actualization. As a consequence, (3) listening is materially depen-
dent. And, moreover, (4) we can arrive at these conclusions about sounds and
music only if we investigate them in a material and multisensory register. The
dominant discourse about sound, the assumptions on which traditional analy-
sis is based, and my proposed material and multisensory notion of sound sum-
marize the comparison between the perspectives of the figure of sound and the
practice of vibration in the introduction.
As Susan McClary observes, “our music theories and notational systems
do everything possible to mask those dimensions of music that are related to

Music’s Material Dependency • 49

physical experience and focus instead on the orderly, the rational, the cerebral.
. . . The fact that the majority of listeners engage with music for more immedi-
ate purposes is frowned upon by our institutions.”56 While much has changed
(in part as a result of the impact of her own research) during the twenty-plus
years since McClary penned this insight, work effectively and affectively ad-
dressing these dimensions—as well as useful, efficient, and compelling tools
with which to examine them—is still needed.
The above scholars relate experiences that exceed the communicative capa-
bilities of current linguistic and analytical schemes. For example, the “scandal”
referred to by Duncan is, I believe, a grasping toward words and frameworks
through and from which we may attempt to understand such experiences. The
sometimes incomplete quality of these scholars’ works is a symptom of the
vastness of the project on which they have collectively embarked. Yet their
work accomplishes a crucial task: it points toward vocal aspects to which cur-
rent ontologies, based in sound and/or vision alone, cannot do justice. It is by
grasping at the ungraspable that we begin to crack seasoned, hardened para-
digms. While this moment is often illustrated by an experience that is difficult
to capture in words, or captured only through describing the ways in which it
breaks with the normative understanding of these musical moments, these ex-
periences are only glimpses. Snapper’s underwater vocal practice shatters the
premise on which music analysis and quotidian notions of our daily experience
of sound rest: that of a stable, knowable sound.
Snapper’s expanded notion of sound presents a new perspective akin to a
paradigm shift. I envision the first stage of this process of breaking into a new
ontological perspective as akin to a Heideggerian hermeneutic circle, which
gradually moves us toward a multisensory understanding of sound. Traveling
around the circle, we alternate between two different perspectives: one find-
ing an experience (often a displaced experience, like Snapper’s underwater
opera) inexplicable within the current paradigm and another questioning the
paradigm that fails to encapsulate the new experience. That is, we use this
impossible-to-account-for experience to pry open the paradigm that excludes
the experience. This circular and repetitive movement from particular experi-
ence to ontological questioning and back again is analogous to the hermeneu-
tic circle.
Additionally, following Thomas Kuhn, I argue that the gradual paradigm
shift that occurs through this quasicircular alteration of perspective resembles
movement from one scientific paradigm to another.57 Kuhn observes that a sci-
entific revolution takes place when scientists encounter anomalies unexplain-

50 • CHAPTER 1
able by the universally accepted paradigm under which advances have thus far
been made. A paradigm shift, then, is a matter not just of a new theory taking
hold, but also of the emergence of an entirely new worldview from which new
theories and perspectives flow. While anomalies can exist in any given para-
digm without fundamentally challenging it, here we see an accumulation of
significant anomalies sufficient to cause the discipline to be thrown into a
“state of crisis,” to draw on Kuhn’s terminology again.58
The state of crisis identified by Kuhn as the launching pad for a new para-
digm refers, in our case, to the dead end in sonic research and discourse. While
some might argue that this state of affairs is not sufficiently significant to con-
stitute a paradigm shift, I believe that much scholarship on sound, music, and
voice has descended into a state of crisis through continuously opposing vision
and audition.59 Sterne has succinctly summarized the binary distinction that
still results in discursive battles between eye and ear. In a return to Enlighten-
ment ideals, “the audiovisual litany,” as Sterne puts it, “idealizes hearing (and
by extension, speech) as manifesting a kind of pure interiority.”60 For a number
of years, one principal source of fuel for sound scholars has been the question
of whether there might be a way to look beyond the visual and aural binary
when thinking about and through sound. While the intense tendency to back
away from visually based paradigms seems to have diminished, we are still
in need of useful models with which to think through sound. As I suggested
above, a new paradigm, or simply a useful and usable framework from which
to think through the multitudinous experience of sound, can only be created
if we think about sound from an altogether different perspective: rather than
conceiving of voice and sound as phenomena with fixable identities, captured
and held by the eye or ear, instead we must understand that we are party to,
and partake in, a process and an experience.
What I seek to offer in the remaining pages of this chapter is a general ana-
lytical picture drawn from these experiences. Specifically, I apply the notion of
sound suggested by Beauvoir, Moi, and Snapper—namely, that sound is sensed
by the material, lived body—to a classic maritime tale of listening and voices.
I ask if, as a multisensory perspective suggests, we are all ears, will Odysseus’s
story, hinging on eardrum-based audile techniques, hold up?
We recall Homer’s Odysseus binding himself to the mast of his ship, having
instructed his crew not to untie him even if he begged, while the crew’s ears
were filled with wax so that they would not be fatally tempted by the sirens’
alluring voices. This story ostensibly demonstrates Odysseus’s bravery and cun-
ning by showing him outwitting the sirens while also enjoying their voices.

Music’s Material Dependency • 51

Some have already read this story against the grain. Let us consider three espe-
cially relevant readings and, finally, conduct a brief reading within the new
paradigm.

Reexamining the Encounter between Odysseus and the Sirens

Ruminating on the reasonable idea that no amount of wax could keep out the
sirens’ tempestuous voices, Franz Kafka suspects that there was actually noth-
ing to be heard by either the sailors or Odysseus. Kafka believes that the sight
of Odysseus’s triumphant expression as he sailed into danger with his genius
plan in place rendered the sirens silent—or perhaps they decided not to waste
their voices on him. This view suggests that Odysseus in fact heard nothing;
instead his desperate gesticulations to the sailors, ordering them to untie him
because of the pull of the sirens’ voices, enacted one of the tallest tales a man
ever told. In Kafka’s words, “the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than
their song, namely their silence”—and Odysseus “did not hear their silence.”61
So here we are presented with two different accounts of how Odysseus and
his men were able to travel close enough to expose themselves to the sirens’
voices,62 yet escape their fatal allure. The difference between the stories turns
on two points: how the men were kept safe from the tempting voices and what
Odysseus heard. Homer’s account suggests that, because of his cunning, Odys-
seus is the only person who ever lived to tell of the sirens’ incredible voices.
Kafka claims the whole thing was a setup that has conned readers and audi-
ences for thousands of years. The men sailed safely by because the sirens did
not actually sing.63 (But, having gone to the trouble of being tied to the mast,
Odysseus would have been the last to admit that his efforts were in vain.)
Hence, in both Homer’s and Kafka’s accounts, the sailors were prevented from
bearing true (auditory) witness to events. Moreover, both interpretations as-
sume that hearing takes place, and that Odysseus hears exactly what he is pre-
sented with—even if it is silence.
For both Mladen Dolar and David Copenhafer silence is the opposite of
speech, singing, and sound. Both scholars assume that the absence of one is
the presence of the other, and also that the existence of one always already
offers the potential of the other. For Dolar, reading Kafka, the voice at its
purest exists in silence.64 For Copenhafer, Kafka’s casting of Odysseus’ wax-
filled ears pretending to resist nonsounded sound constitutes a situation in
which it “becomes necessary to play with one’s potential to listen and to not
listen.”65 While both readings and musings on Kafka’s version of Odysseus’s
encounter are intriguing, to me the notion of a default to silence as the oppo-

52 • CHAPTER 1
site of the potential impact of voice lacks imagination in terms of the human
voice’s sensory range. It also strikes me as too simplistic that a slightly mys-
terious element of this story, the reason assumed for Odysseus’s triumph, is
silence. Is Odysseus—or, for that matter, are we—up to that task? It is sig-
nificant that the element on which this story turns, the cause for Odysseus’s
triumph, is silence. “The politics of silence often assumes a conservative guise
and promotes itself as quasi-spiritual and nostalgic for a return to the natural,”
Steve Goodman writes. “As such, it is often Orientalized and romanticized
tranquility unviolated by the machinations of technology which have mili-
tarized the sonic and polluted the rural soundscape with noise, polluted art
with sonification, polluted the city with industry, polluted thought with dis-
traction, polluted attention with marketing, deafens teenagers and so on.”66
Goodman’s list contains well-rehearsed pure sites that are liable to contamina-
tion. Reading Odysseus, it is worthwhile noting that the nonsilence—that is,
the nontranquility and the destructive force—is, in Odysseus’s case, the sound
of feminine gendered voices. Therefore, to that list add “polluting male ratio-
nality with the female voice.”
Let us return to Kafka’s suspicion about whether the sirens made any vocal
sounds by recalling Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s reading of Odys-
seus’s exploits.67 These scholars indict Odysseus for initiating a dynamic real-
ized much later by capitalism, accusing him of finding no more than enter-
tainment in the sirens’ song, a protobourgeois reduction of the song’s unique
enchantment to the “longing of the passerby” (Sehnsucht desser, der vorüber-
färt).68 Drawing on Adorno and Horkheimer in writing about Debussy’s
“Sirènes,” Lawrence Kramer suggests that an Odyssean dynamic exists be-
tween the modern concert audience and the music it consumes: “Fixed in his
seat at the concert hall, the listener becomes the modern form of Odysseus
tied to his mast, for whom the enchainment of the body makes possible the
enchantment of the mind.”69 These readings, as Adriana Cavarero has pointed
out, are anachronistic in their consideration of the “bourgeois.”70 But a view of
Odysseus bound to the mast as a restriction of perspective wherein voice be-
comes commodity is nonetheless a perceptive observation about our general
tendency to confine the experience of voice to a single physical sense.
The new paradigm I propose would ask us to examine how listening func-
tions in these stories from a multisensory perspective.71 If hearing is strictly
confined to the eardrum, either Homer’s or Kafka’s version may be accepted
without hesitation. Nevertheless, within the paradigm of voice and sound that
I suggest—which refuses to assign stable, measurable identities to sonic phe-
nomena and refuses to associate each physical sense with only one region of

Music’s Material Dependency • 53

the body—both Kafka’s and Homer’s plotlines collapse. Applying this new
paradigm, we could ask: Could not the sailors, despite the wax in their ears,
sense and be affected by the vibrations of the sirens’ voices? “The song of the
Sirens could pierce through everything,” says Kafka—but volume doesn’t seem
to be the pivotal point here.72 Research on prenatal hearing has confirmed
that reactive listening takes place as early as sixteen weeks into fetal develop-
ment—in other words, eight weeks before the complete formation of the ear
(which occurs at twenty-four weeks). This has led researchers to believe that
hearing begins in the skin and skeletal network. Listening begins with the rest
of the body in a “primal listening system” that is only later “amplified with ves-
tibular and cochlear information.”73 In other words, our sense of hearing relies
not only on excited eardrums, but also on sound conduction and vibration
throughout the body.
I would respond thus to Homer’s story: If the sirens indeed sang, the sailors
would not have been protected by their wax-filled ears, as their entire bodies
would still have conducted the sound. If Kafka is correct in his suspicion that
the sirens did not sing, the most potent question is not about Odysseus’s hon-
esty but about his hearing: Did Odysseus know that they were silent, or did he
honestly believe that he heard them? From this we can extrapolate the ques-
tion of the aesthetic object: What do we have the capacity to hear when we
are enmeshed within a certain sonic paradigm? Can we hear and sense what
is right in front of us, beyond the given paradigm? Perhaps the sirens were
silent, but Odysseus was trapped by the idea that they would sing; his belief
prevented him from hearing their silence.

Are We Still Odysseus?

On my theoretical table, I have laid materials spanning thousands of years—
Snapper’s underwater opera and Odysseus’s challenge—as vehicles for com-
paring the implications of traditional and multisensory vocal paradigms. Snap-
per’s challenge of mastery through a strategy of technical proficiency, the
success of which disproved traditional rules, prompted my shift in analytical
focus from notions of stable sound and implied notions of a priori knowable
works to multisensory aspects. According to this new analytical framework,
Odysseus was out of touch with the reality of the situation. Odysseus’s version
of the story suggests that because he was so smart and had planned everything
so well, he was able to trick the sirens. In general, he implies, it was his abili-
ties (rather than luck) that led him to overcome the multiple challenges pre-
sented by his journey. But analyzing Odysseus’s encounter with the sirens from

54 • CHAPTER 1
a multisensory perspective calls his side of the story into question and begs us
to probe his motive. Looking closer, we may see that Odysseus imagined these
manly challenges and his triumphs over them. That is, when he felt that his
life was in danger as he attempted to break away from the mast to which he
was tied, the perceived danger was a phantasm, existing only in his head; the
sirens did not waste their voices on him. But this illusion was not only of his
making. From a multisensory perspective, his error did not lie in the belief that
he had conquered the sirens; rather, it lay in believing the story of the sirens’
voices that had been passed down to him, in allowing this tale to go unques-
tioned, and in profiting from such a narrative. Rather than perceiving the ma-
terial specificities of the particular circumstances in which he found himself,
Odysseus heard what he expected to hear.
In contrast, when singing under water, Snapper set out to question master
narratives regarding gendered expressive possibilities, how to deal with the
notion of the end times, and how and where to practice voice and opera. By
mastering situations that were supposedly impossible to master within oper-
atic practice, Snapper felt freed to create a logic and a worldview that worked
for her. Applying the perspective derived from analyzing her music to music
scholarship, we may see that Snapper’s work contributes to dismantling com-
mon analytical tools and begs for new ones. When we undertake the perspec-
tival shift that Snapper offers, we realize that the being of sound can no longer
be assumed to be stable throughout time and circumstance. By extension, we
see that we cannot fully account for the creation and functioning of the world
according to master narratives.
Snapper’s underwater opera work shows us that air has been naturalized
as a material transducer for sound, and therefore suggests that sounds are
contingent on the material circumstances in which they are created and ex-
perienced. By highlighting the material aspects of sound and their reception,
Snapper reminds us that what we hear depends as much on our materiality,
physicality, and cultural and social histories as it does on so-called objective
measurements (decibel level, soundwave count, or score)—which are them-
selves mere images, icons, and metaphors. Indeed, the experience of sound
is a triangulation of events wherein physical impulses (sonic vibrations), our
bodies’ encultured capacity to receive these impulses, and how we have been
taught to understand them are in constant play and subject to negotiation. Ex-
perience cannot support a stable ontological explanation of sound or music;
rather, as sound cannot exist in vacuum (as alluded to in the chapter’s epi-
graph) each such account is a composite manifestation of our understanding
of sound at a given material moment in time and place.

Music’s Material Dependency • 55

 On the one hand, each aspect of sound on which Snapper invites us to
reflect is a well-known sonic phenomenon. These underwater operas remind
us that music affects us in many ways beyond those for which current analyti-
cal schemes can account. On the other hand, despite the seeming extremity
of Snapper’s underwater practice, it is particularly illustrative of the inability
of sound, music, and voice to be autonomous, because they are always already
materially dependent. Moreover, Snapper’s is a self-conscious music practice
that insists on the operatic normative label. Pulling singing, listening, voice,
sound, and music into a multisensory schema addresses the crisis of audio-
visual centrism and the dependency of each sense on the other and, simul-
taneously, the binary between thinking about music as for the eye or the ear.
Indeed, by letting go of the idea that a 440 hertz A, lasting a quarter-note in
the metronome count of sixty, is always precisely this, or remains precisely this
regardless of who is listening, where, and under what material conditions, we
relinquish the notion of a stable analytical basis and an even more fundamen-
tal certainty.74 Because the traditional paradigm denaturalizes sound’s material
specificity, it assumes the ability to know a priori. Snapper’s underwater vocal
practice shows us that what forms the basis of analysis is not only a set of mea-
surable musical parameters defined prior to experience; instead it is an unfold-
ing process bound to a materially specific, contextually grounded and formed
sensory complex.
Analytically, then, does it matter whether we know that sound is multi-
sensory? Or, for that matter, whether we indeed sense the sound beyond
aurality—a state to which this book’s title, Sensing Sound, alludes? As we will
see in the remainder of the book, I believe that the multisensory aspect of
music is powerful, working on us whether we are aware of it or not. It is pre-
cisely because of the privileged position given to the aural mode of sound
within musical contexts that other modes such as vibration are in danger of
being conceptualized as extramusical, or as extreme and liminal. In this view, a
mode such as vibration is understood as nonintegral to explaining musical phe-
nomena, with the result that vibrations often fail to be accounted for as part of
musical or aesthetic experience. Instead, vibration is commonly understood as
a science of sound—a liminal, nonaesthetic sonic phenomenon (largely rele-
vant to, say, heavy bass music or deaf community music appreciation)—or as
offering a subpar aesthetic contribution (for example, music therapy).
The straightforward answer to the question of whether it matters that we
know that sound is multisensory is that, in terms of sound’s effect, it does not
matter. Yet it does matter when sound is not recognized as multisensory, and
its presence is thus addressed in other terms—for example, meaning, value, an

56 • CHAPTER 1
impossible-to-analyze feeling, and so on, or the aspect of music that McClary
has described as “listeners engag[ing] with music for more immediate pur-
poses.”75 In other words, by not only privileging but even naturalizing the aural
mode of sound in music analysis, discourse, and definition, we have also aes-
theticized sound in a total and limiting way that, in the end, will stand between
us and the possibility of gaining full understanding of the rich phenomenon of
music. Investigating the multisensory aspects of musical practice and experi-
ence is one productive path toward more fully understanding our meeting with
and participation in what we call sound and music. Considering multisensory
aspects of music will yield deeper insights into “sound and music cultures in
relationship to power,” which Goodman has dubbed the politics of frequency,
and which I would slightly rephrase as the politics of aestheticizing the sonic
mode of frequency at the cost of failing to include vibration in normative musi-
cal experience.
In summary, denaturalizing air as the default medium for the material trans-
mission of sound through examining Snapper’s vocal practice has allowed us to
take the first of three steps, which are distributed over the first three chapters
of this book. These moves clarify (1) the material specificity of sound, (2) the
spatial-relational acoustic dimension of sound, and (3) the merely symptom-
atic role of sound. We see that by taking seriously sound’s material dimen-
sion—not only in the scientific realm, but also in the context of aesthetics,
voice, and music—we may understand more about voice’s, and music’s, im-
pact. This will eventually lead us to the concluding chapter, which brings these
notions to bear on our capacity to understand ourselves in relation to the world
and other human beings.

Music’s Material Dependency • 57