"What wizardry is this?": Listening and voice in the undergraduate voice studio

This dissertation describes the activities of an undergraduate voice studio in an attempt to explore familiar rhetorical concepts, in particular listening and voice, in the context of a discipline outside of rhetoric and communication studies: music. Following five singers and one instructor over the course of one academic semester and drawing on participant observation, video-recordings, fieldnotes, and interviews and conveyed through feminist lenses, this study illustrates what the author calls “reflexive listening.” This type of listening, facilitated in an environment of reflection and support, engages with aural and unsounded phenomena, represents bodily—as opposed to intellectual—comprehension, and ultimately leads to changes in the experience of a vocal production. Understood through the lens of reflexive listening and drawing on an ecology of material and affective phenomena, voice emerges as liminal, dialogic, and distributed.