Lip-Synching as an Account of Oneself: Digital Music Videos and the Voice–Gesture Relationship

Abstract Digital-era music videos are a crucial part of singers’ mediatic performances. Lip-synching is often central to such products, supplying situations in which singers can mouth their voices while dislodging themselves from the struggles of singing. Looking into music videos by focusing on their lip-synching practices, this paper aims to understand the part voice takes on in the medium while also investigating how gestural lip-sync performances work as accounts of oneself that produce a musical subject, sometimes updating or overcoming social regulations. In this sense, lip-synching is theorized as a way of framing music videos’ gestural labour.