Zahra Khalid Mirza

This thesis presents a post-textual reading of Zeynep Bulut’s "Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin", which frames voice as skin as a permeable, relational surface spanning bodies, technologies, and listening communities, with an emphasis on plasticity, non-dyadic exchange, and the sonic commons. To test and extend Bulut’s propositions, in a three-month experiment, I train my voice and its AI clone in parallel in order to sing together in a hybrid live performance, where the research culminates as an artistic project. Intensive training sessions, annotated logs, and machine learning models are analyzed to test Bulut’s aspects of voice building—plastic, electric, and haptic—across human and synthetic bodies, exploring how authorship, agency, and what Bulut refers to as uncertain voice circulate within shared voice as skin. Borrowing analytic tools, vocabularies, and methods from artistic research, vocal pedagogy, sound and voice studies, intersectional and posthuman theory, AI voice synthesis, and human–computer interaction, the research aims to return its synthesis to these fields as open source, shared cross disciplinary findings and tools.