When the Voice Leaves the Body
In Country, Niels Rønsholdt brings two voices together in an acoustic chamber-music setting. One is Jakob Kullberg’s – recognizable, embodied, raw. The other is also his, but not entirely: a manipulated, filtered, and displaced voice that drifts through the work like an alien echo. Within an otherwise organic universe of cello, chamber orchestra, and song, this voice appears detached, almost homeless. It sounds – but it has no visible body.
What does it mean to hear a voice without a human being?
What does it mean to hear a voice without a human being? And what does it do to our experience of presence, credibility, and identity when the same singer is both present and absent in his own music?
The Acousmatic Voice
Already in the opening track, »We Will Dissolve«, the two voices meet in duet. Kullberg’s voice stands out clearly, while the other lingers beside it like a shadow. In »Trees (I)«, the manipulated voice takes over entirely. Here the difference becomes striking: where Kullberg’s vocal carries traces of breath, friction, and physical exertion, the other voice appears reduced, filtered, almost disembodied.
One might call it acousmatic. An acousmatic sound is one whose source is hidden – we hear it without being able to locate its origin. In Country, the voice is sampled and processed, detached from the body that once produced it. It is not autotuned in a pop sense, nor wrapped in lush indie effects. On the contrary, it seems to have been passed through a reductive filter that dissolves what we usually associate with vocal identity: the depth of timbre, the movement of vibrato, the clarity of articulation. Consonants and vowels blend into a thick electronic haze. The result is anonymous – and faintly unsettling.
The human voice is always already embodied; we hear it as more than mere sound
The contrast to Kullberg’s own vocal is striking. The human voice is always already embodied; we hear it as more than mere sound. Roland Barthes described this particular element as »the grain of the voice« – the bodily grain, the surplus that concerns neither technique nor meaning but presence itself. In Kullberg’s singing, we hear precisely this grain: the huskiness of the vocal folds, the pressure in the consonants, the slight uncertainty in the phrasing. Even without seeing him, we sense the body behind the sound.
The Doubled Self
Yet Country complicates this distinction. For the acousmatic voice is, in fact, also Kullberg’s. He sings with himself – both as body and as trace. The manipulated layer is not a foreign machine but a digital doubling of his own voice. Authenticity, then, is not absent; it is transformed.
It is precisely here that doubt begins to arise. At times a vibrato can be heard in the manipulated voice – is it a remnant of the human? Or merely another layer of processing? Can we still speak of a singular »grain« when technology can simulate or amplify the bodily? In an age marked by AI-generated voices and synthetic vocals, the question becomes pressing: when has a voice been in contact with a body – and does it even matter to our experience?
The paradox is that the voice has always occupied a borderland. It originates in the body, yet emerges from an interior we cannot see. It is both visible and hidden. Today it can exist entirely without a body – or rather, without a body we can point to. Country activates this paradox without offering a clear answer.
The paradox is that the voice has always occupied a borderland
Most striking is the meeting of form and content. The lyrics draw on the yearning universe of country music: love, loss, loneliness. »I’d rather be on some dark island, where the sun would never shine / as for you to be another man’s darling…« When such emotions are conveyed by a voice without a visible body, a strange displacement occurs. The authentic and the artificial clash – and in that clash, a new form of credibility emerges.
Between Flesh and Code
At first, the acousmatic voice feels alienating. Gradually, however, it begins to move us. Perhaps because, precisely in its lack of body, it appears as a pure trace of feeling – an echo of something human that cannot be fully erased. The voices slide in and out of each other like a double exposure of identity – human and technology, original and copy.
In this tension between the embodied and the constructed, Country finds its particular strength. The work does not insist on choosing sides. Instead, it invites us to listen to the difference – and to the unease that arises when the voice is both present and absent at the same time.
The essay is part of a series of texts by students of Musicology at the University of Copenhagen. Our writer and lecturer Jakob Gustav Winckler has asked his students to process assignments that they have written in the last part of their studies. The purpose is to gain insight into which topics and issues the students find interesting to deal with today.
English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek