This article is structured around snapshots of everyday life in reception centres for asylum seekers. These set the tone of the sonic and affective dimensions of the experience of the centre, as narrated by a resident, a music teacher, and through ethnographic reflections. The article devises ‘voice’ as a distinct category of the sonic spectrum, imbued with the significance of testifying to human existence, in a twofold way: first as a theoretical lens that offers new perspectives on the asylum seekers’ paradigm, and second, as a methodological tool to gain insights into aspects of everyday life in a reception centre, and by extension gaining access into ‘other’ social worlds that would otherwise remain concealed.

Who gets to have a voice, and what does it mean? Questions of vocal ontology and ethics are perennial, but in a world where the ability to sample the voices of others or to synthesize new ones in pursuit of both creative and commercial endeavours is available more widely than ever before, the relationship of the voice to the individual body, agency, and rights is invested with a new urgency. Through a discussion ranging from The Little Mermaid to Kanye West, Cathy Berberian to Holly Herndon, this short provocation considers the manifold ways in which we find, have, and borrow voices.

This introduction to the round table attempts an overview of the conceptualizations of ‘voice’ and ‘agency’. It maintains a dialogic balance between the novel insights offered by each contribution’s topic and the authors’ distinct angles, and current debates around voice and agency. The introduction interweaves philosophical, anthropological, and, of course, (ethno)musicological approaches to the vocal phenomenon, highlighting its complex dimensions as well as its dense intersubjective meaningfulness. If ‘listening’ is the counterpart of ‘voicing’, integral to its very materialization, ‘vocal agency’ urges us to think beyond the interconnection between the vocalizer and the listener, shifting our focus of attention to the capacity of the voice to offer insights into and through itself.

This article conceptualises voice as a constellation, examining how objects, images, and sounds (or their absence) speak to the lived experiences of displacement. Drawing from a British Academy-funded project with a Syrian artist collective and a women-led social entrepreneurship initiative in Istanbul, we explore the affective assemblages of loss, belonging, and forced displacement through an ethnographic mode of listening. Bringing together a crocheted life jacket, a painting, and a piece of music that cannot be played, we consider how a politics of listening can offer new ways of understanding forced displacement and agency beyond voice as speech or narrative. We advocate for an approach that foregrounds thick solidarity, collective expression, and intersubjective relations of vocality.