Voice feminization traverses the threshold between the human and the machine, particularly in Japanese contexts, where the feminized voice is intricately linked with markers of technology, virtuality, and artificiality. The ubiquity of female-coded voice assistants in everyday spaces (i.e. trains, elevators, shopping malls) renders the feminized voice as a highly audible cyborg (Haraway 1985). In this paper, I apply Jules Gill-Peterson’s theorization of trans embodiment as technical capacities of the body (2014) to posit that voice feminization exemplifies strategies of trans technicity through timbral manipulation. Drawing from my voice lessons taught by the Japanese idol and MtF vocal coach Nishihara Satsuki, I conduct an ethnographic music analysis of her song “Hanako Yamada” (2022) that incorporates music analytical approaches of embodied listening, mimetic engagement, and material practice (Cusick 1994; Heidemann 2016; Luong 2019).

My timbral analysis of “Hanako Yamada” is built upon the conceptual framework of iki – a Japanese term with three interrelated meanings. Beginning with iki’s most common interpretation as “breath,” I investigate the feminization of breathiness across Euro-American (Malawey 2020) and Japanese (Starr 2015) contexts, exploring its attributions with sensuality, politeness, and eroticism. Breathwork is integral to Nishihara’s voice training methods, as it serves to denaturalize not just gendered timbre, but also the very process of respiration itself. This brings me to the second definition of iki as “living form,” which complicates the theorization of cyborg hybridity in foregrounding organisms over machines. However, just as voice is not intrinsic to the body but culturally situated (Eidsheim 2019), so is breath concomitantly “originary” and “technic” (Gill-Peterson 2014). Examining the interplay between live recording, pitch correction, and synthesized instrumentation, I analyze how “Hanako Yamada” embodies a cybernetic organism on a structural level. Lastly, I apply iki as an aesthetic category rooted in “erotic life” (Gould 2017) to reveal the centrality of autoeroticism within the transfeminist cyborg, intertwining present and future selves through vocal self-actualization. I argue that vocal feminization engages in the recurrent practice of trans sonic technicity, inhaling and exhaling in perpetual motion.

This paper proffers an analytical method of listening for the transvocality of avant-garde pop producer SOPHIE’s artistic practice, and presents an analysis of her dance single, “VYZEE” (2015). Sung over a driving beat, the lyrics are beautifully vague, describing the physical manipulation of an undefined “it.” Throughout the track, the words are punctuated by synthesized musical gestures which evoke the sounds of various materials popping, squishing, and twisting. Indeed, what exactly is the unknown “it” heard throughout the track?

Responding to Baitz’s (2018) call for a trans method, I document a listening practice that attends to what/who we hear when confronted by unfamiliar sounds. Here, my paper answers Eidsheim’s “acousmatic question” (2019)—Who/What is speaking?—by employing Smalley’s “spectromorphology” (1997) to develop such a practice. Through a diaristic tabulation and analysis of the aural links between sound and source produced by my and others’ listenings—or as Smalley puts it, the “adventure in bonding play”—I grapple with my listening positionality that insists on bonding familiar sources to unfamiliar sounds, and struggle to imagine otherwise. Through this process, I show that “VYZEE” produces a highly unstable source bonding that shuttles rapidly between materials over time in a vibrant superposition of morphing objects.

In seizing on the associative slippages of listening, SOPHIE enjoins listeners to approach the profusion of sounds in relation to that evasive “it” with a kind of playfulness that celebrates the coexistence of manifold and contradictory source bondings. I argue that such an orientation instantiates, as Susan Stryker (2008) puts it, a transsexual sadomasochistic “dungeon” for (musico-)erotic experimentation within the musical space of “VYZEE.” More specifically, I contend that bonding play engenders “dungeon intimacies”—between listener, their source bondings, and “it”—that carries the potential to counter-frame entrenched subject-object dualities and render them “iridescent, shimmering, unceasingly active in its inversions” (Bachelard 1958). It is through this practice, I suggest, that we may begin to answer Medina’s (2023) appeal to attend to the “(h)earing” of objects and organs that resemble the human—“it”—to endure an increasingly necropolitical world insisting on trans erasure.

“If you play Spalarkle to a body of water, it causes ribbon-like streams of bubbles to appear… Spalarkle-water is oxygenated,” nonbinary DJ and producer felicita says of their latest album (Paper Magazine 2023). One song on Spalarkle in particular locates the subject/listener within this music-oxygenated seascape alongside invertebrate life: “Sex With Anemone.” This song features overlapping rhythms whose (hyper)metrical alignments shift over long time scales. They fade in and out as the phrase “sex with anemone” is repeated, fragmented, and stretched out. This paper analyzes “Sex With Anemone”’s overlapping pulses and fragmented text as a sonic embodiment of rippling trans time through the body of a sea anemone, ultimately arguing that the song performs a praxis of t4t (trans for trans) intimacy and care.

“Sex With Anemone” joins a lineage of trans thought that center animals to interrogate ideas of “human-ness” that trans subjects are often denied. Like the starfish (Hayward 2008), felicita’s sea anemone destabilizes anthropocentric ideas of bodies, sex, and gender. Sea anemones further disrupt concepts of listening focused on the human Ear, blurring distinction between external touch and hearing. Musical sex thus occurs with/through the water across the body’s surface, instead of penetrating a listening ear. In listening to “Sex With Anemone,” we come into intimate physical contact with the interwoven “streams of bubbles” produced by the songs in-and-out-of-phase pulse layers as they hit our bodies. We listen-with/as a sea anemone.

Just like trans subjects existing in “the interregnum” (Malatino 2019), the gap in trans lag or pleated time (Carter 2013) between a difficult present of misrecognition and violence and an impossible imagined future of having safe homes within the body and society, “Sex With Anemone” is caught in reception between illegibility and distant untouchable fantasy. But through listening-with/as the sea anemone, the song and its audience refuse to accept this “position of not being present” (Israeli-Nevo 2017). As its oxygenated watery pulse streams and syllables come in and out of alignment, the song performs and produces the expanding and contracting pleats and ripples of transitional time, making space for t4t intimacy in the interregnum.