This article analyses composer Pamela Z's work in light of critiques of posthumanism from Black studies and sound/music studies. Z's large-scale multimedia work Voci (2003), which the artist describes as a ‘polyphonic mono-opera’, consists of a series of eighteen scenes that combine vocal performance with digital video and audio processing. Z manipulates these sources using the BodySynth, an alternate controller interface that converts bodily gestures into expressive control signals. Z's work has been considered through cyborgian, Afrofuturist, and posthumanist discourses. But rather than affirm her practice as fully consonant with technological visions of the posthuman, I argue that she challenges the very liberal humanism upon which the posthuman is built. For a key tenet of liberal humanism, as Alexander G. Weheliye observes, was the racial and gendered apportionment of humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans. We have never been completely human, he suggests, let alone posthuman. Z uses technologies of the embodied voice to confront both the posthuman imaginary and the continued effects of its ideological preconditions in racio-colonial liberal humanism. In a Voci scene entitled ‘Voice Studies’, for instance, Z engages the problem of ‘linguistic profiling’ as it applies to housing discrimination, citing the work of Stanford linguistics researcher John Baugh. Against a backdrop of percussive vocalizations, Z explains, ‘Studies reveal that people can often infer the race of an individual based on the sound of their voice’, subsequently playing back recordings of housing applicants containing vocal signifiers of racial difference. The article then contrasts this kind of ‘aural dimension of race’ found in Jennifer Lynn Stoever's notion of the ‘sonic color line’ with Pierre Schaeffer's attempt to separate sound from the social – as well as from bodies and identities – in his practice of acousmatic reduction. With this in mind, I show how Z construes the voice as an acous(ma)tic technology of embodiment while reframing opera's humanist legacy through Voci's allegorical narration of the ‘prehuman’, ‘human’, and ‘posthuman’. Moving with and against a posthuman imaginary, Z suggests that although we have never quite been human or posthuman, we may nevertheless narrate new versions of each.

中文翻译：

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“我们如何从来不是后人类”：Pamela Z 的声音中的体现声音技术

本文根据黑人研究和声音/音乐研究对后人类主义的批评，分析了作曲家帕梅拉 Z 的作品。Z的大型多媒体作品沃奇（2003 年），艺术家将其描述为“复调单声道歌剧”，由一系列十八个场景组成，将声乐表演与数字视频和音频处理相结合。Z 使用 BodySynth 操纵这些信号源，这是一个将身体姿势转换为富有表现力的控制信号的替代控制器界面。Z 的作品已经通过赛博格、非洲未来主义和后人类主义话语进行了考虑。但我并没有肯定她的实践与后人类的技术愿景完全一致，而是认为她挑战了后人类赖以建立的非常自由的人文主义。正如 Alexander G. Weheliye 所观察到的，自由人文主义的一个关键原则是将人类在种族和性别上分配为完整的人类、非完全人类和非人类。他建议，我们从来都不是完全的人类，更不用说后人类了。Z 使用具身声音的技术来对抗后人类的想象及其意识形态前提在种族殖民自由主​​义人文主义中的持续影响。在一个沃奇例如，在题为“声音研究”的场景中，Z 引用了斯坦福语言学研究员 John Baugh 的工作，将“语言分析”问题应用于住房歧视。Z 解释说，在敲击发声的背景下，“研究表明，人们通常可以根据他们的声音来推断个人的种族”，随后播放包含种族差异的声音能指的住房申请者的录音。然后，这篇文章将 Jennifer Lynn Stoever 的“声音颜色线”概念中发现的这种“种族的听觉维度”与 Pierre Schaeffer 在他的声学实践中试图将声音与社会以及身体和身份分开的尝试进行了对比。减少。考虑到这一点，沃奇对“前人类”、“人类”和“后人类”的寓言式叙述。支持和反对后人类的想象，Z 建议虽然我们从来没有完全成为人类或后人类，但我们仍然可以叙述每一个的新版本。