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Lip-Synching as an Account of Oneself: Digital Music Videos and the Voice–Gesture Relationship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2025

DANIEL DE ANDRADE LIMA Open the ORCID record for DANIEL DE ANDRADE LIMA [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Digital-era music videos are a crucial part of singers’ mediatic performances. Lip-synching is often central to such products, supplying situations in which singers can mouth their voices while dislodging themselves from the struggles of singing. Looking into music videos by focusing on their lip-synching practices, this paper aims to understand the part voice takes on in the medium while also investigating how gestural lip-sync performances work as accounts of oneself that produce a musical subject, sometimes updating or overcoming social regulations. In this sense, lip-synching is theorized as a way of framing music videos’ gestural labour.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , First View , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Musical Association

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Footnotes

I would like to deeply thank Amy Skjerseth, whose comments have greatly improved my original manuscript. I also thank Suzana Mateus for the assistance with the discussions on Beyoncé. This research was partly financed by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001.

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