Giulia Deval: Pitch. Notes on Vocal Intonation

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 levels of meaning expressed by sounds. By paying attention to how tones and vibrations interact with bodies — including 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 digressive and ironic lecture, “PITCH” brings to light the theory of the Frequency Code by the 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.

With the support of slides, textual excerpts and overhead projectors, Deval explores the ethological and phonetic sources, placing them in relation to cultural history and, in particular, to Anne Carson’s essay “The Gender of Sound”, which offers a historical excursus on the stigmatisation of high-pitched voices. 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 strikes us as shrill may in fact prove to be the result of a long history of constructing deviance. Echoing the ethological interest and the 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 Alessandro Ghigi Lecture Hall of the former Institute of Zoology.