In Western culture, hearing music in general, but especially hearing the human voice, is often considered a medium capable of putting its listeners in touch with the invisible realms of the human and cosmic soul. Nowadays music is almost unanimously defined as the art of feeling or the language of the soul, but the specific philosophical conceptions underlying this model of music’s deep connections with the soul have dramatically changed over the last five hundred years. This collection of essays by leading scholars addresses an important chapter in the development of ideas about hearing, music, the voice and the soul that has not yet received its due: the fundamental shift that took place in Renaissance theories of human nature and its relationship with music theory and practice. Hearing the Voice, Hearing the Soul investigates how philosophers, scientists, music theorists, composers and musicians shaped these new views, and were in turn shaped by them, in the complex world of the Renaissance.