On January 26, I successfully passed by PhD Viva Voce (aka the “defense”)!
The PhD thesis is titled Imagining & Sensing: Understanding and Extending the Vocalist-Voice Relationship Through Biosignal Feedback.
The TLDR (and it is a very long thesis, indeed!); I explored how singers are able to understand complex, internal feedback as they perform. Because the voice exists internally and is a part of the body, vocalists must have refined control and work with their instrument without seeing or touching it. Instead, vocalists rely on internal feelings and intimate understanding of their bodies. I examined how we can externalise some of the sensations and internal movemens to interact with our vocal movement in novel ways, and learn about this connection and be playful with the vocal physiology to better understand ourselves. We then applied this knowledge to communicating subjective sensory experience in musical interaction and human-computer interaction more broadly; hopefully, understanding the interaction with the voice and dialogue with the body will lead us to developing more intuitive, individual-reflective experiences with technology.
My examiners were Prof. Alexander Jensenius (University of Oslo) and Dr. George Fazekas (Queen Mary University of London) – a massive thanks for such an engaging and rewarding viva, and for the helpful feedback.
I’m excited to share more of this work soon – two chapters of my thesis have been adapted for and accepted to the ACM TEI and CHI conferences this year~
Courtney N. Reed 