Eugenia Siegel Conte

Overlaying lenses from ethnomusicology, musicology, sound studies, affect theory, and theoretical voice studies, Eugenia Siegel Conte searches for new ways to contextualize and reexamine how music interacts with culture, geography, feeling, and systems of power. Through her research and in the classroom she works to introduce reflexive ethnographic methods with musicological topics, considering how and why we make music from organized sound and investigating how and why we privilege certain musics and sounds over others.

Dr. Conte’s music studies scholarship relies on observations in rehearsals with professional choirs as they conceptualize their connections to acoustic space, relational bodies, and affective structures. Issues of sonic power and purpose have cropped up throughout her research with professional choral groups in the US , UK, and Europe—including Roomful of Teeth, King’s College Chapel Choir, the Tallis Scholars, and VOCES8, among others—as well as within her vocal performance training as a semi-professional chorister. She connects basic choral techniques requiring embodied diagnostics of space and voice to affect, memory, and cultural mores in rehearsal and performance. Inspired by cultural studies scholarship, she argues that vocal, physical and affective mechanisms, along with cultural comprehension and social investment, are tied together in “affective regimes” (Mankekar and Gupta 2016), hegemonic guides through physical, mental, and emotional experience curated via various powers and actors during choral vocalization.  Drawing from voice studies, sound studies, and affect theory, she reasons about how singers’ bodies and the acoustic spaces in which they sing are collaborative with and reactive to each other, and that choralism is connected physically, mentally, and historically to popular culture, emotion, and even ethics. Currently she is developing a book project, Hidden Choirs: Affective Regimes, Cinematic Imaginaries, and Professional Choralism, that investigates how choral vocality is imbricated in the affective structures of film scores.

Dr. Conte received her PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in September 2023. She also holds degrees from Wesleyan University (M.A. in Ethnomusicology); Truman State University (M.A. in Music Research) and Illinois Wesleyan University (B.A. in Music—Vocal Performance). Prior to teaching at the University of Southern Maine,  she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Musicology/Ethnomusicology at Ithaca College (2024–2025).