Karaoke Theory / Karaoke Therapy

Abstract

This article, an outcome of practice-based artistic research, concerns singing as a therapeutic performance and conveyor of knowledge. It arises from my project fugitive radio, which responds to the uptake of radio in contemporary art by pursuing experimental modes of “performance-radio.” Following a voicing event in Helsinki, a colleague suggested that singing had been “somehow civilized out of us”, prompting me to investigate connections between singing, therapy, and knowledge and in relation to the global phenomenon of karaoke singing.

My considerations are framed by ideas from neuroscientist and popular writer Daniel J. Levitin, who argues that the human brain evolved with song, and ethnomusicologist and voice therapist Anne Tarvainen, who encourages her clients to pursue unconventional methods of singing so as to experience their bodies in relation to power. Singing forms discussed include samba and música popular brasileira, Sámi yoiking, Estonia’s Singing Revolution, and Aboriginal “Songlines”, the latter being exemplar of how knowledge is kept in song. Thus, my text turns to consider how (Western) knowledge is subordinate to discourse and how artistic research fits into this schema with reference to the writing of curator and theorist Simon Sheikh. Its final movement follows the “ontological turn” in anthropology and philosophy to addresses how different practices of “worlding” arise as struggles in contemporary art and artistic research.