Narratives on Amateur Singers: Dialogues About Voice Shame and Resilience

In this chapter, the narratives emerge in and from dialogues—interview dialogues, dialogues between the two co-writers and researchers, and dialogues in the researchers’ theoretical encounters. With this method, we explore the phenomenon of voice shame in encounters with narratives from interviews concerning music experience and emotion knowledge. We use excerpts with two amateur singers, one man and one woman. The inquiry reveals an interstice between shame and resilience, a seemingly healthy stance in a discourse telling many amateurs that “you don’t sing well.” Inspired by Frank’s dialogical narrative analysis and his Bakhtinian perspective on dialogues and voices, as well as Polkinghorne’s Bruner-inspired terminology on analyzing narratives and narrative analysis, we encounter the data and conduct our analysis and discussions, allowing the many levels of dialogue to reveal new aspects of our topic as well as of our methodology.