Pamela Z (born Pamela Brooks, 1956) is an American composer, performer, and audio artist who works primarily with her voice and live electronic processing. Raised in the Denver area, the African American Z received her bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she studied classical voice. After performing throughout Colorado as a rock musician under the name Pam Brooks, in 1985 she moved to San Francisco, where her experiments with live digital delay vocal processing began leading her down a different artistic path, and she changed her name to Pamela Z. In performance today, she typically processes her live voice through MAX MSP software on a PowerBook, combining operatic bel canto and experimental extended vocal techniques with percussion objects, spoken word, and sampled sounds. Z has performed in such festivals as Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center in New York, the Interlink Festival in Japan, Other Minds in S