Foreword
Foreword
The past two decades saw the rise of a new theoretical interest in the human voice, orality, and hearing as cultural techniques. Many disciplines, such as philosophy (especially phenomenology), linguistics, communication and cultural studies, cognitive sciences and media theory take part in the rediscovery of the importance of the voice. Our selection presents some seminal texts from this wide spectrum. Each of them centers around the mediality of human voice, while they represent the most important problems of the researches of human voice: from the ontologic status, mode of being or affects of voice in general, across the questions of being, consequences and validity, or the endlessly analyzed dialectics of living and dead, or the problem that the voice is bodiless and bodily at the same time, thus the problem of its breaking out of the body, to the various scenarios of the emancipated voice-body in the history of sciences and technics. But the reader will meet other questions as well: the problems of phonation and articulation, the integration of the voice into the communication process (that is, the question of its transformation from asemion to semion), or the relations among different layers of voice and subjectivity. And our selection also presents papers which analyze in aesthetical terms the human voice in its probably most special manifestation: the singing voice.