De voce

In the West, there is no classical field of knowledge that takes the voice as its object. To be sure, the arts of the ancients are hardly unfamiliar with its name and idea; psychology, logic, music, rhetoric, grammar all encounter the voice, even as each advances theses concerning it. Strictly speaking, however, none of these disciplines devotes itself to the voice alone, for a simple reason: in the ancient arts, the voice appears as a field to be presupposed. This circumstance raises several questions, of which this essay offers a preliminary articulation. What is the voice, if it is a domain in which something such as letters and notes are to be discerned? Does the voice itself - beyond its partitions - ever appear? Might it also have a sound.