In this talk, Dr Zeynep Bulut will present an excerpt from her ongoing project, Sustainable Speech, supported by Engaged Research Seed Fund at QUB. She will discuss the exploration of embodied voice in experimental music and the early assistive technologies devised for inclusive music making — such as the Adaptive Use Musical Instruments (AUMI) developed by Pauline Oliveros, Leaf Miller, Miller’s students, and researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — as cases of creative technologies of voice making. She will then examine whether or how such creative technologies may offer expanded, diverse, and more "sustainable" ways for recoveries of speech, in comparison with functional technologies including smart phone and tablet applications, digital assistants, and wearable electronics for tracking improvement in speech and language. 

Zeynep Bulut is a voice and sound theorist. She is a Lecturer in Music at SARC, Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Sound and Music, at Queen's University Belfast. Her first book, Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin (London: Goldsmiths Press, distributed by the MIT Press and Penguin, 2024), theorizes the emergence, embodiment and mediation of voice as skin. Her articles have appeared in various volumes and journals including The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art, Perspectives of New Music, Postmodern Culture, and Music and Politics. She is project lead for the research platform, Music, Arts, Health, and Environment, supported by the Economic and Social Research Council's Impact Acceleration Account at QUB. Alongside her scholarly work, she has also exhibited sound works, composed and performed vocal pieces for concert, video, and theater, and released two singles. Her composer profile has been featured by British Music Collection. She is a certified practitioner of Deep Listening.