giulia deval - PITCH. Notes on vocal intonation | Art City 2026 Special Project

From 5 to 8 February 2026, as part of Art City 2026, the former Institute of Zoology in Bologna hosts PITCH - Notes on vocal intonation, a performative lecture by giulia deval.

giulia deval is a singer and multimedia artist who explores the politics of the voice.
Her nomadic training between music and visual arts leads her to develop audiovisual narratives that investigate the different layers of meaning expressed by sounds. By paying attention to how tones and vibrations interact with bodies—also through wearable devices or participatory activities—the artist traces the ways in which sound constructs social roles, reshapes boundaries, and activates dynamics of conflict and exclusion.

PITCH. Notes on Vocal Intonation is a project developed as a performance-lecture and video essay that explores the role of intonation—and in particular the use of high and low tones—in the construction of power structures.

In the form of a meandering and ironic lecture, PITCH brings to light the theory of the Frequency Code by phonetician John Ohala, according to which an innate mechanism leads us to associate high tones with the idea of smallness and low tones with that of physical largeness. This theory is in turn based on the studies of zoologist Eugene S. Morton on various species of birds and mammals, and on the key role of vocal intonation in communicating one’s size (real or apparent) in situations of conflict, with remarkable capacities for mimicry. According to Ohala, in human societies secondary, culturally stratified associations would have gradually overlain the primary meanings of largeness and smallness, linking low tones to impressions of authority and high tones to nuances of frivolity, low credibility, and subordination.

With the support of slides, textual excerpts, and overhead projectors, deval explores ethological and phonetic sources, relating them to cultural history and, in particular, to Anne Carson’s essay The Gender of Sound, which offers a historical overview of the stigmatization of high-pitched voices.

On the one hand, Carson focuses on the purging of high tones from the voice of the orator in ancient Greece—the voice that asserts itself in the civic space par excellence and must demonstrate moderation and self-control; on the other, she analyzes the mythological figures generated by this mindset: monstrous precisely because they are endowed with an out-of-control voice—high-pitched, shrill, deceptive, or excessively talkative—such as the Harpies, the Gorgons, the Sirens, Cassandra, or Echo. With an approach that oscillates between the educational film and parody, deval challenges the presumed innocence of sonic perception and exposes its cultural conditioning.

What sounds shrill to us may in fact reveal itself as the result of a long history of the construction of deviance. Echoing the ethological interest and didactic framework of PITCH, the work is presented on the occasion of ART CITY Bologna 2026 both as a performance and as a video in the Aula Alessandro Ghigi of the former Institute of Zoology.