Chapter 6 examines the reconstruction of Rwanda’s music scene after the genocide. It considers how it opened up new possibilities for young urban Rwandans to transform their hearts and imagine new visions for themselves. Although young artists seemed to share an understanding that song could communicate ‘messages’ (abatumwa) not available in other modes of speech, they also understood there were limits to this. Far from being a space of ‘freedom’ or the ‘unofficial’, the local music scene was shot through with politics. Young artists were keenly aware that the power dynamics that shaped wider post-genocide social life equally shaped the kinds of music they were and were not allowed to make.

This chapter focuses on the new sound economy that Pentecostalism brought to Rwanda after the genocide. It considers a wide range of Pentecostal sound practices – from noise-making to praise and worship to Pentecostal radio – and shows how sound was understood to be key to inner and outer transformation. Pentecostals drew a distinction between ‘godly’ and ‘secular’ media, which allowed some young singers to become ‘gospel stars’. This chapter equally focuses on the materiality of Pentecostal sounds – the work that sound does outside of its discursive properties – and places this within the wider sonic context of post-genocide Rwanda. The RPF state has increasingly cracked down on noise – associated both with the new churches and nightclubs – and in 2018 closed thousands of chruches across the country. Perhaps ironically, despite their differences, the new Pentecostal churches and the RPF state share a conviction of sound’s transformative power.

The Conclusion returns to the case of Kizito Mihigo and his tragic death in February 2020. It considers how his music reveals a certain politics of humanity, and the ways in which the RPF state tries to define who is and is not to be considered human. Returning to the theme of sound, noise, and silence, it sugggests the importance of taking sound seriously in Rwanda. Thinking more closely about sound – not only its discursive properities but its material ones as well – opens up new avenues for scholarship.

Joseph Albernaz examines how “the modern category of lyric voice is entangled with processes of racialization.” Albernaz focuses on the complaint poem, a subgenre that was especially important to Romantic-era abolitionists, who often ventriloquized enslaved Africans. And yet, Albernaz contends, Romantic poetry, particularly as it is taken up by Black writers, is also capable of refusing the racial logics it has traditionally upheld. In such instances, complaint negates the world as it is and reveals, however briefly, “the collective undersong of No, the depthless well of non-sense from which all sense springs.”

The focus of this chapter is Francophone Haitian women writers. These are writers who are bound by a common idiom, French and/or Creole, and who share similar concerns. What is to be ascertained is whether they occupy a territory in which literature acquires its full meaning. Given the dominance of male writers in Haitian literature, women writers may appear as marginal figures or minor voices. However, what this chapter demonstrates is that women writers have, over many years, challenged the status quo by simply being present and making their voices heard. They offer a female-centered perspective on the tensions and contradictions of Haitian society and, as such, open new doors to imagination. Dealing with such themes as love, loss, otherness, memory, and empathy, Haitian women writers have effectively affirmed the humanistic value of literature. The term écriture de l’urgence, coined by Yanick Lahens to define Haitian literature in general, acquires a special meaning when considering women authors. Urgency does not equate haste. Rather, it refers to the direct confrontation of the writer with reality, history, and the endless possibilities of language.

This chapter outlines a novel, rigorous method for studying literary recordings, which can support a paradigm shift in the study of literature as performance. The method incorporates leading-edge, open-source digital tools for analyzing speech patterns in recordings, and an ethically grounded approach to analysis, with attention to the neuroscience of speech perception, implicit bias in listening, and relevant theories of sound studies and voice studies. It also includes an overview of our own work on poetry recordings and of related developments in digital voice studies, and speculates about future directions for this research.

Manga communicates diverse qualities of sound through visual effects applied to writing. Voices in spoken dialogue, thoughts, and voiceovers are often represented through different type fonts or handwriting. This serves as a narrative tool to differentiate between text categories but also gives each one of them a specific resonance in the reader’s mind. Manga employs a multitude of usually handwritten mimetic words to express sounds and other sensations. Among the various graphic shapes these words assume is a semi-materialization of the written characters, which can undergo physical effects of the represented phenomenon and enter the spatial depth of the storyworld. The Japanese writing system heavily facilitates the visual characteristics of mimetics in manga, be it with the expressive use of the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, the vowel-lengthening symbol, or the sonant mark.

This chapter marks the starting point of our investigation of actual policy solutions to tackle armed conflict. When a doctor has reached her diagnosis, she must then decide on the right medication to administer. Similarly, while economists started by studying the drivers of political violence, in recent years increasing efforts have been made to understand how to cut the Gordian knot of conflict. As argued in this chapter, a first-order factor is the institutional environment, and in particular the need to give a voice to all citizens and groups in society. Democracy is desirable, but without proper safeguards it can have a dark side and result in blood being spilt. Furthermore, the type of democracy and the provisions of sharing power between groups matter. Closer inspection of local-level power-sharing in Northern Ireland, the building of modern Switzerland after its civil war in 1847, the difficulties for current democratization in Iraq and the franchise extension during the British Age of Reform drive this discussion forward.

What does the periodical essay of the early eighteenth century contribute to the novel as it was developed by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and others? This chapter focuses on how the periodical essay showed novelists new possibilities both about how to build a relationship with readers over time and on the use of an authorial persona to narrate and organise incidents. The distinctive intimacy the essay creates between author and reader, cultivated in the case of the periodical essay in instalments published over time and with attention to special features of the protracted duration of production and consumption, provides both rhetorical and material inspiration for novelists experimenting with new ways to reach readers and intensify their relationships with them.

De Tocqueville helps us see American democracy as a way of life shaped by individualism and a dislike of theatrical display. In John Adams, the ideals of Protestant Christianity and Roman republicanism collided. Adams believed in personal integrity, but was unashamed to perform a social role, inspired by the Roman republican orator Cicero. In the nineteenth century Hugh Blair repositioned rhetoric as a way to speak truth, in a language that in practice confined truth-speaking to the elite. When working-class Irish Americans sought a more inclusive democracy, they found a symbolic representative in the actor Edwin Forrest, and many died in the ensuing riot outside a new opera house in 1849. Black Americans first found a public voice through the person of Frederick Douglass, whose oratory was founded both on preaching and on the old flamboyant republican tradition. Women first demanded a voice in the context of Quakerism and the campaign to abolish slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton later argued for female suffrage in terms that were more secular, more individualist and ultimately more elitist.

Children add more information to their utterances by packing more material into a single clause. They can specify roles, modify nouns with adjectives and verbs with added locatives and adverbs. They can add demonstratives (those) and quantifiers (many) to nouns, and make clearer what they are referring to. Young children’s early constructions tend to mirror parental usage, just as their lexical choices do. They follow preferred argument structure and place given information in the Agent slot of transitive verbs, and keep the Object slot of transitives and the Subject slot of intransitives for new information. They may omit given information at this stage and only later add the relevant pronoun subjects. In both questions and negations, they take time to master the use of auxiliary verbs and rely on fixed “frames” for some time as they learn the meaning of each wh- question word. Children also take time in learning how different perspectives can be marked within the clause, with choices of causative, location, or voice alternations. Here children must learn the options verb by verb.

This chapter explores the concept of voice, both as the marker of an individual poet and as a poem's specific configuration of form and content. Taking as its chief case study the work of Ishwar Gupta, the chapter examines voice as vocal utterance and as the representation of identity. It shows how Ishwar Gupta's singular and innovative voice, epitomizing a shift in the history of Bengali poetry from an oral to a written poetics, is characterized both by intricate sound play and by its politically charged representation of the modern city in colonial India. The chapter concludes by demonstrating that, even when encountered as text on the page, the voice of Ishwar Gupta's poems remains living and material: this is a vernacular voice, sensitive to the everyday, the local, and the urban. In this way, the voice of the poem conveys the lived materiality of a specific historical moment.

This chapter offers a thorough overview of choral composition from its historical foundations in the church to modern trends in choral music today. It outlines technical issues around text setting, writing for specific voice types, notation, and tips for writing for amateur or less experienced groups.

There are certain foundations of effective communication, and all are revealed and explored in this chapter. They are: clarity, brevity, simplicity, authenticity, and – sometimes surprisingly – humility, or the power of listening.

This chapter explores the voice as a complex, expressive instrument. It begins by outlining voice types, techniques, and styles – ranging from opera to musical theatre and popular music –  before looking at the relationship between language and music, and finally exploring the nature of idiomatic vocal writing and so-called extended techniques. The chapter finishes with a nod to the future of vocal music by briefly thinking about the voice in conjunction with electronics.