Cultural assumptions about what it means to be old and what it means to be young are reflected in how we hear aging artists.

Michael Kinney wants to know: How have notions of age and aging shaped the way we listen? When we hear someone sing – a folk legend at a protest or an opera star delivering an aria – it isn’t just vibrato and tone that reach our minds, it’s cultural expectations. 

“There’s a tendency to think sound is natural and the knowledge gleaned from voice is inherent. But it’s not,” Kinney says. “We hear things based on our cultural context, and a large part of that cultural context is how we understand the life course, what it means to be old, what it means to be young, and the value we place on those different life categories.”

As a New Map of Life Postdoctoral Fellow at SCL, Kinney is working on a book that investigates the ambivalences — and new possibilities — of the human voice over a lifetime. He is interested in how certain aging voices, for example, Johnny Cash, might connote wisdom and authority, while other voices, such as operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti’s, must remain pristine even in old age. It includes analysis of “Sky on Swings,” a 2018 opera starring two older opera singers portraying women with Alzheimer’s who fall in love in a nursing home and whose older voices can be heard as beautiful. 

Kinney explains his scholarship is about the politics and ethics of listening in musical practice, community, history, and aesthetics. It is also, he says, about “song as a form of human expression, not as a consumer product.”

These concerns are not theoretical, he says. For many singers, age may remove them from the stage or cause them to undergo risky surgery to sound younger.

Kinney, whose faculty advisor is Heather Hadlock, associate professor in Stanford’s Department of Music, is currently finishing a paper that examines how the commodification of youth in music industries reinforces the idea that aging is a devaluing process. Being able to hear older voices as valuable in themselves moves our society closer to age equitable relationships, he says.

Kinney has played trombone since childhood and studied biology as an undergraduate. He switched to musical training at age 22, “relatively late,” then focusing on the intersection of music, biology, and history. At Stanford, he earned his PhD in musicology, writing his dissertation on how cultural ideas about aging and value influence our experience of voices and vocal performance.

He is the author of multiple book chapters, including on feminist embodiment, aging, and longevity in the Las Vegas residencies of Céline Dion and Cher, and on aging voices and bodies in the musicals of Stephen Sondheim. As the co-convener of the “Musicking in Old Age” study group, Kinney is devoted to bringing together scholars to understand old age and the life course in music and sound studies.