| Summary: | This article brings recent debates within trans and queer scholarship regarding the body to bear on questions of 'trans music', considering in turn how trans music tempers these debates. The determinate, possessed body is the current conceptual and material problem engendering a bifurcation in trans studies, as some scholars (within and without musicology) are rethinking trans studies' relationship to queer theory. Readings of these disciplinary renegotiations are mobilised towards setting the agenda for trans music and sound studies, asserting that the relations, however contradictory they may seem, between 'queer' and 'trans' theories and methods must be sustained. The article proposes 'transaurality' as a method of trans music studies. This method is tested out when listening to techniques of voice and breath in the track 'Faceshopping' by the late transgender artist SOPHIE. Seeking to offer a model of socio-aesthetic analysis that listens for the ways in which sound makes transitions of gender and sex audible and actual, this method develops a critical and material approach to aurality.
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