Page - 67 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

Voicing the Technological Body | 67www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 49–69 time, from aging to dying, although we still perceive the presence of, for example, a young pop star. Moreover, we may even be unsure about the singer’s gender and/or sexuality, as the experiments in the context of schlager recordings from as early as the 1920s illustrate. Some cases, like Max Kuttner’s gramophone schlager, reveal how popular culture even reflects its medial and technological conditions. Secondly, more than just a recording tool, the microphone can even be used as an amplifier of the vocal presence. Comparable to the microscope in the visual world, the microphone enhances something that can otherwise hardly be perceived. It moves even soft sounds closer to our ears, closer than we ever could get to the mouth of the singer or the vocal percussionist or beatboxer. Thereby, the music can include quite different affections, from emotions of romance (crooning) to anger and aggres- sion (growling). The singer’s identity is represented in that enhanced way through the microscopic microphone. At least in the moment of listening, there is no way to encounter the singing body more distantly. Thirdly, at its core every recorded voice is a hybrid of bodily and technologically produced sounds. Maybe the general presentness of sound makes us tend to ignore the technological part of the recorded voices in favour of a more or less illusionary encounter with another body. However, machines like the vocoder or the talk box or software effects like the “Cher-effect” in Auto-tune blatantly expose the hybridity of recorded voices. Although cyborg sounds may sometimes even reveal “robotic” qualities, they generally offer a wide range of musically represented hybrid identities. This kind of hybridity does not necessarily challenge stereotypical dichotomies in the fields of race and gender, but it has the potential to do so, as the use of cyborg voices by African American musicians and female singers shows. The example of Lady Gaga reveals that her queer-feminist concept is manifest not only in her visual aesthetic, which has been qualified as “Gaga feminism” by Halberstam, but also in her hybrid vocal sounds. It should be obvious that these three categories are not absolutely distinct from each other; they may intermingle in many different ways. Within the scope of this article I have attempted to show that it is most interesting to study the relationships of body and technology in close readings of musical examples. Certainly, other exam- ples from the multifaceted world of recorded popular song would produce different observations, and it will be interesting to study how the use of microphonic identities and hybrid voices changes in light of recent developments in Internet technology and mobile devices. That, however, will be another story.