Voicing voicing: attuning to the material in studio recording the Lullaby Choir

This article presents a close ethnographic reading of an intercultural community choir's experience recording lullabies in a professional studio setting. Bringing together Chadwick's (2020, 2021) posthuman voice analytics with interdisciplinary voice studies, I turn ethnographic ears to the voice-as-vocalised by attuning to its materialities and more-than-human entanglements. In so doing I work to trouble idealised conceptions of voice that permeate music education practice and research, including the tropes of giving voice, finding voice and collective voice that I deployed in co-developing and facilitating the Lullaby Choir itself. By interrogating naturalised regimes of aurality and voice, this article contributes to broader efforts that enliven the material and the bodily in music, education, and research – considered together and separately – gesturing to pedagogies of sensation.