"Every so often a book appears after decades of historical spadework and deep thinking. Voice Machines is that book. Gordon's vivid imagination and her analytical skill at suturing the smallest details to the largest conceptual understandings gleam on every page. With bracing lucidity, she builds her histories brick by brick from long-lost archives while also intuiting powerful meanings from present-day politics and artefacts. That double motion enables her canny reflections on voice, body, technology, race, the machinic, the postcolonial, and the posthuman to lead to a reimagining of castrato history. The upshot is something of a miracle. Voice Machines gives us a radically new argument, delivered with estimable intellectual power, wit, and verve, about the stakes of musical bodies as machinic assemblages."– "Martha Feldman, author of 'The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds'"