Musicology and Inter media studies research seminars: AI voice software and posthuman vocal figurations in popular music culture

Veronika Muchitsch

The female pop singer is a central figure in twenty-first century popular music culture, and her voice is a primary site for negotiations of gender. This is due to the powerful cultural assumption that voices reveal something intimate about the gendered bodies and subjects they are produced by. At the same time, voices in popular music are thoroughly shaped by technological (and other forms of) mediation, rendering voice in popular music a particularly rich site for negotiations of gender. In this paper, I examine the possibilities and limits of AI voice software for critically reconsidering constructions of voice as a signature of human embodiment and subjectivity. I analyze the use and reception of AI vocal software trained on the voice of Canadian electronic pop musician Grimes, made openly available through the website Elf.Tech in 2023. Three months later, GrimesAI was featured on the song “Cold Touch” released by LA-based producer Kinto and as previously stipulated by Grimes, the two artists received equal royalty shares. Grimes’ active engagement with artificial intelligence software was exceptional in the popular music industry in 2023, where rumors about AI-generated music focalized anxieties surrounding authenticity, artistry, and human creativity. In this paper, I develop Donna Haraway’s work on feminist figurations and offer vocal figurations as a concept for examining how the material discursive characteristics of AI voice software may reconfigure the relationships between voices and the (gendered, racialized, aged, etc.) bodies and selves they are produced by. I also consider what debates about AI voice technology in music can tell us about dynamic discourses of gender and gendered subjectivity in twenty-first century music cultures.

Bio: Veronika Muchitsch (PhD) is a lecturer in Gender Studies at Södertörn University and an affiliated researcher in Musicology at Uppsala University. Her research investigates mediations of music and subjectivities at the intersections of human and technological processes in contemporary music cultures. Her postdoc research on mediations of gender in algorithmic music cultures has included studies of TikTok’s affective and mimetic music practices (Popular Music and Society, 2024) and of mediations of gender in ‘genrefluid’ playlist curation on

Spotify (IASPM Journal, 2023). Her study on transfeminine voice in the work and reception of singer-songwriter Anohni (Popular Music, 2023) was awarded the IASPM-Norden Early Career Scholar Award 2024. She currently develops her research on voice and gender in 21st-century popular music culture in a monograph under contract at Bloomsbury Academic.

All are very welcome.