This dissertation investigates the cultural context and implications of British colonial elites and metropolitan musicians engaging with song as a material practice and an object of knowledge at the end of the long eighteenth century. Both socially embedded and fully embodied, singing has long been imagined through the lens of Western metaphysics as revealing the essential qualities of a person or people—a critical index of the body and the special purview of humanity. More recently, scholarship across music studies has demonstrated the centrality of listening to the colonial projects of classification and control. The present study is thus situated at the convergence of voice studies and global music history, employing ideas and methods from decolonial theory, early modern critical race studies, and queer theory, to articulate the work of song and the discourse of musical voice in the production of colonial modernity and its emergent categories of humanity. To underscore the intimacies and intricacies of vocal practice and identity in this period, it focuses on socially liminal figures—West Indian Creoles, East Indian nabobinas, Italian castrati, and English Jews—in moments of intimate performance and vocal–aural exchange between England and Jamaica, Scotland and India, and Italy and Australia. The dissertation locates the production of modern global/colonial knowledge at the nexus of aurality and vocality—an ephemeral site of bodies in sonic contact—as the definition of music among elite Europeans underwent an aesthetic constriction and definitive shift towards the instrumental, the monumental, and the literate (and therefore infinitely reproducible). Through an archive of historical and pedagogical treatises, personal accounts, and operatic repertoire, this study moves between public and private spaces, metropole and colony, and singer and listener, highlighting the connections between aesthetic production and consumption, human difference, and imperial domination. Over four chapters, it considers practices of listening to, performing, documenting, and teaching song as they informed racial hierarchies, defined practices of desire, and disciplined bodies in contact. Reevaluating the singing cultures of late Georgian and Regency Britain and its colonial empire, it illustrates how the embodied engagement between voice and ear engendered new epistemological frameworks and discursive constructions of humanity and history.