Francesco Venturi researcher, vocalist, composer

The Transformability of Voices

The Access Question in Voice Education and the Continuity of Vocal Learning

Practice-based PhD – Kingston University, London, 2019-2026

Supervisors: Leah Kardos, Oded Ben-Tal, Freya Jarman-Ivens

Abstract

Voice education is currently distributed across separate institutional domains—artistic training, clinical rehabilitation, gender affirmation—each with distinct methodologies, lexicons, and implicit theories about who accesses transformation and under what conditions. This fragmentation obscures the continuity of the biological and relational mechanisms that underlie vocal change across the lifespan, naturalizes functional stability as a fixed condition, and restricts access to transformation to those who fall within specialized pathways.

This practice-based dissertation argues that vocal transformation constitutes a single morphogenetic process—rooted in neural plasticity, tissue adaptation, and sensorimotor reorganization—that begins in the embryo and persists until death, and of which institutional practices are particular facilitations rather than separate phenomena. The study advances this argument through two interconnected movements. The first develops a theoretical synthesis across developmental biology, comparative morphology, ecological learning theory, and neuroscience to elaborate the concept of vocal morphogenesis as a continuous, pre-institutional condition. The second investigates the conditions of its facilitation through practice-based research and autotheory, proceeding from the interwoven positions of student, artist, and educator. From this inter-positional inquiry emerges the operative concept of delatentization: the reactivation, under specific relational conditions, of a transformative capacity that persists in the stabilized adult voice.

The dissertation is epistemic rather than methodological in scope: it proposes no protocols, but reframes voice education as facilitation that prolongs the pre-institutional continuity of learning. Its principal contribution is a transdisciplinary framework that recognizes childhood exploration, performative training, (re)habilitation, and identity-based vocal practices as instances of a shared morphogenesis, and configures conscious access to vocal transformability as a matter of wellbeing, agency, and social priority.