Auto-tuning Hannah Montana: Miley Cyrus's Child Voice and the Technological Subversion of Girlhood

With reference to recordings made by Miley Cyrus between the ages of between 12 and 16 years old for Disney’s Hannah Montana, this chapter examines how the manipulation of her voice through auto-tune and other studio production techniques attempted to construct a normative girlhood by controlling sonic elements (pitch, vibrato, formant frequencies, breaths, etc.) that signify age, gender, race and sexuality.

However, girls such as Cyrus with deep aurally damaged voices fuel the possibility of disruptive readings of the ‘natural’ child and subvert prescriptive constructions of innocence. Auto-tune and the creation of a voice-object separate from the ‘naturalised’ body of the child also has the potential to unsettle dominant narratives of girlhood.

Through the consideration of the combination of expectations of Disney and tween pop as a genre; Hannah Montana’s main themes of control, secrecy and the constant manipulation of identity; and the ideologies that uphold protectionist discourses of childhood, I argue that auto-tuning Miley Cyrus’ atypical child voice constructs a complex and resistant intersectional subjectivity.