November 3, 2025/ 3:00 PM

Royce Hall, Rm 243

Colloquium with Alexander Murphy

At the height of Japan’s interwar era of mass sound media, the human voice became a highly charged site of theorization at the crossroads of literature, science, and performance. This talk explores this ferment with a focus on the work of Kanetsune Kiyosuke, an eccentric musicologist who spent the 1930s attempting to elaborate the musical, linguistic, and acoustical properties of what he termed the “Japanese voice.” To this end, Kanetsune produced dozens of phonetic spectrograms using early sound-on-film technology in order to visualize what he proposed as unheard continuities in Japanese between song and language, language and labor, and labor and social life. While such a project resonates on its surface with strains of nationalism ascendant during the interwar period, this talk proposes that Kanetsune’s eclectic methods serve more crucially to model a materialist poetics through which to envision something other than the “Japanese voice” it invokes.

Alexander Murphy is an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. He studies modern Japan with a focus on the relationship between sound, language, and the body across literature, media, and performance. In these settings, he is attentive to how aurality enlivens subject formation and social life in transmedial and border-crossing practice, and how the study of voice and sound can be brought to bear on matters of race, gender, and mobility. His current book project, tentatively titled What the Ear Sees, explores the cultural politics of the voice in interwar Japan at the intersection of music, poetry, and public speech.

Sponsor(s): Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies