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'Language, 'assumes and alters its power to act upon the real through locutionary acts, which, repeated, become entrenched practices and, ultimately, institutions...' The voice is thus marked by the law - by the social lexicon of proper speech. It registers, in its audibility, the idealogical parameters of a given society though secret inflections, causing speech to tremble or whisper or fail according to a given situation. At the same time, the voice performs such lexicon in an attempt to speak through it, to get past the situational boundaries by appropriating and over speaking language. In this way, the individual is formed by language and, in turn, forms language through enactment.'

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Judith Butler,

'...if we think of the voice as a sound source, we usually imagine it coming from a single individual that the voice then refers back to, as an index of the one who speaks. The subject then becomes the object to which the sound belongs. Yet to shift this perspective slightly is to propose that what we hear is less the voice itself and more the body from which the voice resonates, and that audition responds additionally to the conditions from which sounds emerge, such as the chest and the resonance of the oral cavity. And further, the sound source makes apparent the surrounding location against which occurs, from outside the body and to the very room in which the body is located. This slight shift overturns the sound source as a single object of attention, as body of sound, and brings aurality into a broader field of consideration by introducing the contextual. Sound not as object, but as space'.

Brandon LaBelle,