Page - 66 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

66 | Florian Heesch www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 49–69 other passages may be generated with Auto-tune or similar effects, the final robotic sound clearly resembles a typical vocoder effect. Certainly, “Aura” is a typical pop track even in carrying different readings. Nev- ertheless, I think, this short look at Lady Gaga’s use of hybrid vocals can be read in consort with Jack Halberstam’s model of “Gaga feminism” as a strategy of using up- to-date popular styles and technology and at the same time playing, in ways that may seem crazy, with aesthetic modes of identity.56 While Halberstam focuses on Lady Gaga’s visual strategies and obviously considers her musical output less relevant, we have seen that the latter offers interesting insights on challenging notions of identity, certainly even more than can be explored within the scope of this article. As this exemplary overview of strategies for using the body and technology for the creation of popular musical voices has shown, all these aesthetic practices raise questions about fictional and real identities. Popular musicians tend to make use of the most up-to-date technology even for transforming voices or creating new voices. This does not necessary result in new or never-heard-before sounds – pop is mostly not interested in the strategies of musical avant-garde. However, the links between the use of technology and aspects of identity are also novel territory. In this regard, many of these popular hybrids of bodily and technological voices connect to very cur- rent discussions about who we are and why and how we use both our bodies and our technology. CONCLUSION This article started from the observation that since the advent of phonography in Euro-American culture, singing voices have mostly been listened to in technologically transformed and transmitted ways. Recorded popular song is certainly highly rele- vant for the perception of music, for how people experienced and still experience the singing voice in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The presentness of sound, according to Ong, highlights the importance of the encounter with the singing sub- ject for hermeneutic approaches to recorded popular song. Listening to song raises the question of the identity behind the voice. In my example-based overview of the technological and musical history of popular-song recording, I have developed three systematic categories for describing the variety of the relationships between voice, body, and technology with regard to musical representations of identity. First, as a basic effect of phonography we hear the voices of absent bodies. While we experience that recorded sound as a presence, the identity of the vocal subject is directly bound not to a body in the here-and-now but to bodily produced sounds in the there-and-then, which implies an uncertainty about the present identity of the singer. He or she may have gone through more or less dramatic changes in the mean- 56 Halberstam 2012.