There are several cool finds which we expect to pop out from the pipeline in the course of 2022:

• The voice group’s third paper, entitled “Creepiness and the Uncanny,” has been accepted for publication in the scholarly journal of Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture. The paper integrates the humanistic and social scientific literatures on creepiness and the uncanny, which have looked at these experiential phenomena in very different ways. Please look for the published article, which also covers vocal creepiness, in an upcoming issue. The authors of the paper are Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen and Mathias Clasen.

  • Abstract: This article examines how vocal performances of characters can contribute to sociocritical storytelling in video games. We argue that the vocal performances of video game characters--and in particular their accents--can “fill in” the fictional story worlds of video games through associations to real people and places. These associations allow video games to evoke such social themes as are connected with accent, including privilege, conflict, class, and ethnicity. So evoked, these themes can then be critically examined. We apply this perspective in a sociolinguistic analysis of Disco Elysium, an expansive role-playing game in which the characters’ vocal performances come to support the player’s sociomoral orientation in the game world. Finally, we discuss a result of our analysis that runs counter to previous scholarship, namely that vocal stereotyping can serve to enhance, rather than to undermine, the player’s critical apprehension of game worlds.

• The voice group’s second paper was accepted for publication in Games and Culture, a premiere outlet in the field of game studies. Whet your appetite here:

  • The article examines how vocal performances of characters can contribute to sociocritical storytelling in video games. We argue that the vocal performances of video game characters--and in particular their accents--can “fill in” the fictional story worlds of video games through associations to real people and places. These associations allow video games to evoke such social themes as are connected with accent, including privilege, conflict, class, and ethnicity. So evoked, these themes can then be critically examined. We apply this perspective in a sociolinguistic analysis of Disco Elysium, an expansive role-playing game in which the characters’ vocal performances come to support the player’s sociomoral orientation in the game world. Finally, we discuss a result of our analysis that runs counter to previous scholarship, namely that vocal stereotyping can serve to enhance, rather than to undermine, the player’s critical apprehension of game worlds.

  • The authors of the paper are Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen and Míša Hejná.

• In Spring 2021, we looked into the voices of evil through an analysis of Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist (forthcoming in The Journal of Popular Culture).

  • We observed that evil voices in popular fictions are often made to sound sick--think, for example, of Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars--and we argue that this is because evil is so often understood, metaphorically, as a sort of sickness. We support this argument with numerous examples from literature, film, and video games and conduct a phonetic case study into a particularly infamous evil voice: that of Regan McNeil from The Exorcist (1973) when she is possessed by the demon Pazuzu.

  • An important contribution of the paper lies in extending the repeated finding that fictional characters are often signaled to be evil via a sick and disgusting physical appearance. The markedly sick voice of a character can give the same impression. It does so by rendering the character’s evil to the senses, and, therewith, to the moral imagination.

Stay tuned, much more is happening behind the scenes!