Sound Voice: Voice Loss and Identity

Hannah Conway, Dr Thomas Moors, Katherine Wilde and Professor Martin Birchall.: UCL Performing Place

As part of UCL’s Performing Place programme, composer Hannah Conway collaborated with Professor Martin Birchall UCL's Professor of Laryngology and a Consultant in ENT Surgery at the Royal National Throat Nose and Ear Hospital and Dr Thomas Moore to create Sound Voice: Voice Loss and Identity, a cross-disciplinary collaboration spanning healthcare, opera, (a composer and team of professional artists), music therapy, UCL speech therapy and UCL music research via the medium of artistic residencies involving music composition, creative writing and vocal performance and experimentation.

Working internationally with people with lived experience of voice loss, interdisciplinary professionals, arts venues, festivals and hospitals, The Sound Voice Project aims to understand the intrinsic value of the human voice and how it connects to our identity. What is a voice and what happens when it is gone? Through online workshops over lockdown, professionals and people with lived experience of voice loss from the UK and overseas joined together in a democratic space to have conversations, create and have fun. These workshops resulted in 6 new pieces of chamber works being co-created, which can be viewed online.

Learnings from the project led to transformations in the thinking and practice of the professionals who took part, allowing them to better understand the needs of their client group for whom they are developing ground-breaking new solutions and technology such as a robotic voice box or implantable larynx.

Sound Voice has developed into a transdisciplinary performance project exploring voice and identity to create unique works of art www.soundvoice.org.

Performing Place, produced by Sylvia Kluczewski, brought together live performance artists, Camden communities and researchers in the co-creation of live performance. It is part of the Performance Lab series, where artists, researchers and students explore how live performance can animate research – and how research can inspire art.