Kelly Hoppenjans-Sanders

Kelly's research centers around 21st-century pop music, voice, technology, DIY music-making, and digital music cultures. She is interested in how technologies mediate everyday musical experiences and how artists use musical technology to grapple with human experience. Kelly is currently in her final year as a PhD student at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, Voice Transforming Technology: Digital-Human Entanglements in 21st-Century Pop Music, traces how artists complicate the binary between humans and machines through radically voice-altering technologies like Auto-Tune, the chipmunk effect, and AI voice clones. In this work, she asks what we can learn from previous technologies that unsettled long-held associations between voice and self, emotion, embodiment, agency, and humanity to understand how AI impacts our current moment.