The book Mattering Voices, edited by Laasonen Belgrano, Tarvainen and Tiainen starts with a dedication: “To Voice as Nothing, All and always More-Than…” It is divided in three parts, I Voicing Ontologies, II Voicing Intra-active human agencies and III Voicing the more-than-human. The subtitle of the introduction reveals the aim of the collection: How to let a crossroads emerge between (the study of) voices and new materialism? And many of the articles are dealing with those crossroads, not all of them with music or singing.
 
The section that I found most interesting due to my own concerns was of course the third part, which contains four very different approaches. Julianna Preston writes in “Motor-mouthing” among other things of her own performance RPM hums “where voice made the life force of electric motors palpable” (p 149) and refers to Laura Levin’s idea of ‘performing ground’. Tero Nauha refers to the non-standard thought of François Laruelle in his chapter “The non-standard performance with the singing theremin”. Jennie Tiderman-Österberg describes ‘kulning’ a specific practice of voicing with cows in her text “Cow choirs – Singing-with-more-than-human herds”. She refers to music philosopher David Rothenberg’s idea that “we cannot make any kind of music without sensing its resonance in an environment” (Rothenberg 2001, p 4, quoted on p 2003). In her concluding remarks she further notes how “we should not think ‘what is the point’, but ‘this is the point where I depart into something new’. (p 203) In the last chapter “Speaking of atmospheres – More-than voice and voice of the more-than” Norie Neumark refers to Gernot Böhme’s idea of atmospheres and Ben Anderson’s ‘affective atmospheres’ when describing some artworks. First I am sitting in a courtroom, 2017, by Joel Stern, then Rubber Coated Steel, 2016, by Lawrence Abu Hamdan and finally several versions of their own work with worms.
 
The afterword by Laura Cull brings in further dimensions in the form of echoes, ontological echoes of a new spiritualism and interspecies echoes of intersectional solidarities. In short: a very rich and thought provoking book even for an artist-scholar like me, with no particular interest or experience in voice or the study of voice. But I am talking to trees, so perhaps I should think about that in terms of voice, too.
 
Laasonen Belgrano, Elisabeth, Tarvainen, Anne and Tiainen, Milla (eds.) Mattering Voices – Studying Voice Through New Materialism. Routledge 2025