The voice group’s first paper has been accepted for publication in The Journal of Popular Culture, which is the official publication of the Popular Culture Association (PCA). Please look for it in an upcoming issue.

In the paper, we observe 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. 

The authors of the paper are Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Míša Hejná, Mathias Clasen, and Mark Eaton.