Lipsynching

What does it mean when a singing voice is detached from an originating body through recording? And how does this affect consumers of recorded song? This book examines the practice of lipsynching to pre-recorded song in both professional and vernacular contexts, covering over a century of diverse artistic practices from early cinema through to the current popularity of self-produced internet lipsynching videos. It examines the ways in which we listen to, respond to, and use recorded music, not only as a commodity to be consumed but as a culturally-sophisticated and complex means of identification, a site of projection, introjection, and habitation, and, through this, a means of personal and collective creativity.

Merrie Snell has lectured and led undergraduate seminars on popular music history and theory at Newcastle University, UK and fiction writing at University of Iowa, USA. Her fiction has appeared in multiple literary journals and she has exhibited sound/video works in Sweden and the UK, including Youghost, an installation based on Youtube lipsynching videos.

Michael Bull is Professor of Sound Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. His many authored books include Sirens (Bloomsbury 2020) and Sound Moves, iPod Culture and Urban Experience (Routledge, 2007). He is editor of the Routledge Companion to Sound Studies (2018) and The Auditory Culture Reader (Bloomsbury 2003, and 2016), and co-editor of the Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is a founding editor of the journals, The Senses and Society and Sound Studies.