Music-crit power couple Eric Weisbard and Ann Powers (seated) at last years EMP Pop Con.
Music-crit power couple Eric Weisbard and Ann Powers (seated) at last year's EMP Pop Con.

Organizer Eric Weisbard has announced the theme of this year's EMP Pop Conference, which happens April 14-17 at EMP Museum—"From a Whisper to a Scream: The Voice in Music."

The EMP Pop Conference returns with its biggest roster of presentations yet, looking at the ways music lets us hear voices: singers, to be sure, whether virtuosos or idiosyncratic originals, but also other types of vocalizing. How do instrumentalists insert their selves into their music? When the dominant voices in our songs change, what changes with that, from personal identity to collective messages? A switch in voice—from croon to rasp to rap to Auto-Tune—alters everything it reaches.

Among the dozens of panel discussions featuring critics, academics, and musicians, three presenters have Stranger ties: film editor Charles Mudede, arts editor Sean Nelson, and former freelancer Michaelangelo Matos.

Mudede will expound on “Fontella Bass and the Philosophy of Soul” an examination of Bass's early work and the "gospel roots of soul" in her performance in Cinematic Orchestra's "All That You Give." Nelson gives a paper titled "No Expression Whatever: Is Bad Singing a Moral Issue?” in which he explores "the unorthodox beauty that emerges from singers who have to combat natural deficiencies of pitch or projection to vocalize at all, while also considering how race and class prerogatives inform the badness school and its discontents across genres and generations, and how both sides of the argument tend to make a burlesque out of values like passion and authenticity." Matos will present "Prisoner of Your Love: How Tina Turner Came Back," an appraisal of the soul diva's popular resurgence in the '80s. Both Mudede and Matos appear on the Soul Singers panel April 15. Nelson's panel, Good Bad Singing and Bad Good Singing, takes place April 16.

As a bonus this year, a trivia contest—Record Store Showdown—hosted by KEXP's Greg Vandy will test the musical knowledge of clerks from Everyday Music, Sonic Boom, Spin Cycle, and Easy Street will happen on April 14.

Check out the full schedule here. The Pop Conference is free and open to the public. Registration starts Friday, March 4.