Minding the Gap: The Politics of the Body-Voice Relationship in Multimedia Opera

The singing voice has long been a crucial issue in opera studies, and scholars have increasingly focused their attention on the relationship between voice and body, especially in the context of opera’s involvement with media technology. This relationship has often been conceptualized in terms of a gap or split between the voice and the body, and the material qualities of the voice have frequently been opposed to the textual and visual aspects of opera.1 The attention to the variously formulated gaps or splits between the body and the voice, and between the visual and the acoustic more generally, harbors an important political claim. It relates to the larger critique of the Western representational regime—a critique that has been articulated most forcefully from the position of gender theory. Within the frame of this critique, which centers around the concept of the (mastering and male) gaze, sound has been offered as an alternative to sight, and its critical powers have been emphasized with respect to not only opera but also the new media.2