Covered Mouths Still Have Voices
(2023)
author(s): Tom Western
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
overed Mouths Still Have Voices
Tom Western
UCL Geography – t.western@ucl.ac.uk
Abstract
The title of this essay is a political slogan. It borrows from the chant of medical workers in Greece, who have been asserting that covered mouths still have a voice (“Και τα καλυμμένα στόματα βγάζουν φωνή”) since long before the Covid-19 pandemic began at the start of 2020. The slogan has become politically useful on wider scales since then, and I take it as a jumping off point – a means of understanding political techniques of vocality that have been retuned in pandemic contexts. My focus is on forms of vocal-spatial resistance, hearing how people contest political hierarchies of vocality that have been tightened during Covid, and create new spatialities of voice through pandemic activisms. The essay listens to how voices signal and sound out multiple forms of mobilisation, and it outlines a global sense of voice that develops as a result. From this, ways of hearing mouths and voices emerge not just in terms of speaking and sounding, or only as forms of identity and agency, but as a gathering, a refusal, a resource, a navigational tool, a transformation.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to friends in Athens. To Kareem al Kabbani and Urok Shirhan, whose soundworks resound into these pages. To Fani Kostourou, Pasqua Vorgia, and John Bingham-Hall for organising and running ‘The City Talks Back’. To Fadia Dakka for her kindness and patience in waiting for this essay to be done.
Dialectics of Outside and Inside - A Sonic Study of Being through Illness and Isolation
(2021)
author(s): Mariske Broeckmeyer
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This essay and audio piece explore how the related experiences of illness and isolation problematize the clear spatial opposition of “outside” and “inside.” Adopting the dialectical models, proposed by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his phenomenological study of outside and inside, I aspire to take aural notice on how the migraine sufferer’s sense of space shifts in sync with her sense of self throughout a migraine attack. Composed out of vocal sounds and domestic noises, recorded in and around the house, this piece merges the materiality of the room and voice in a conversation that balances on the edges of meaning. Juxtaposing one unto the other, both self and space get lost in displacement, matter melts and disappears into one roaring drone.
Composition as Commentary: Voice and Poetry in Electroacoustic Music
(2020)
author(s): Edmund Hunt
published in: Journal for Artistic Research, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
What is the role of a spoken or sung text in an electroacoustic composition? Does it represent anachronism, assigning the role of communication to the voice and thereby depriving more abstract electroacoustic material of its rhetorical force? Does the disembodied, electroacoustic voice distance the audience from the communicative power of the words that are heard? Although Simon Emmerson argued that the disembodied human voice in acousmatic music can often seem frustrating, this sense of disembodiment might be turned to the composer’s advantage, as the basis of a methodology for creative practice. In the process of developing a methodology to address questions of text, language, voice, and electroacoustic technology, I created two musical compositions. Both works used the untranslated words of an enigmatic Old English poem, ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’. At first glance, the idea of using a text in an obscure or ancient language that carries little or no semantic meaning for the listeners might raise further questions. Is this a deliberate attempt at obfuscation, hiding the paucity of the composer’s ideas behind a veneer of archaism or even naive exoticism? As my investigation progressed, I began to envisage the process of electroacoustic composition as a type of non-linguistic commentary on a text. Rather than hindering the listener’s understanding of a composition inspired by literature, the electroacoustic voice might help to reveal different interpretations of a text, allowing multiple ideas and identities to be heard.
Ornamenting Vocality. Intra-active methodology for Vocal Meaning-Making.
(2018)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition departs from the silence of a non-existing voice. A voice about to touch the ears and eyes of both author and readers/listeners. A voice already sounding in the head of the author - sounding as thoughts, words, letters and sentences. A non/voice being part of a never ending development of new materialities. An onto-epistemological voice diffracted through a singer's process of making sense of a lesson from a 17th century vocal manuscript. A voice as a mattering method for the art of singing through new materialist theories, vocal and discursive narratives and somatic awareness.
Eclatante Amarante. A portait of the French Singer Anne Chabanceau de La Barre (1628-1688)
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
A journey through the language of passions inspired by the life of the French soprano Anne Chabanceau de La Barre (1628-1688). Highlighting her career in Paris, but also her sojourn at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden (1653-1654), it features her repertory from the Kings chamber, the 'ballets de our' and the 'salons'. Shifting from music to poetry to narration, the project explores how Mlle de La Barre and other female performers in the seventeenth century moved their listeners by expressing the affects through the mirror of the soul - the voice. Music by M. Lambert, S. Le Camus, A-M-. Bartlett, C. Huyghens, P. Chabanceau de La Barre, J. Chabanceau de La Barre, J.-B. Lully & L. Rossi.
[61:55]
Elisabeth Belgrano, voice
Lucas Harris, theorb, lute
Carlene Strober, viola da gamba
Jennifer Ellis, voice
℗© 2004 Elisabeth Belgrano
www.elibelgrano.org
EB2004
Synthetic and natural voice: An inquiry into sensing and perceiving vocality
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Lawrence McGuire
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This project tackles the issue of describing, composing, and perceiving vocality in a synthetic context, highlighting an experiential approach to the perception of a vocal signal. The research primarily focuses
on the idea of fusions of sounds, particularly fusions between synthetic and natural voice, where the
resulting quality enriches a vocal experience through the ambiguities and multiplicities it brings forth.
Design choices and aesthetical considerations of a computer program for vocal synthesis are then
discussed in relation to my own approaches to vocal composition.
VOICE: An Imaginary Ir/Rational Figure of Any Thing
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The voice presented in this NO PAPER PRESENTATION cannot be imagined as separated from any bodily act or matter. It intoxicates all along without an end. This voice emerges out of No Thing (Calcagno 2003). It would not claim to be in a specific relation to gender, class, ethnicity or other classification, yet this voice can be identified as "an imaginary figure of any thing"; a paradoxical voice performed and presented out of unexpected encounters with whatever meaning there might be. This voice can be traced to 17th century Venetian music drama stages - considered to be a symbol for Nothingness as specifically performed in operatic mad scenes. This NO PAPER presents a development of an artistic doctoral project on 'how to perform vocal nothingness' (Belgrano 2011). In the current study a Baradian (feminist) diffractive methodology is applied (Barad 2007, 2012), allowing vocal practice to intra-act continuously with any matter or meaning encountered along the road, by "re-diffracting, diffracting anew, in the making of new temporalities (spacetimematterings)" (Barad 2014). Through this performative approach VOICE argues that vocal identity can be viewed as an entangled dance - where sound, thoughts, judgements, senses, madness, matter, chaos, vibrations and so on cannot be separated from one another - "endlessly opening itself up to a variety of possible and impossible reconfigurings" (Hinton 2013). The result that emerges from this trans-spatiotemporal study is a sensuous queering of operatic vocality that allows individuals to experience a monstrous voice as Any Thing or No Thing, following a discourse on Nothingness that had a fundamental impact on 17th century operatic vocality and on the birth of music drama.
GLORIES TO NOTHINGNESS: A Music Research Seminar honouring Accademia degli Incogniti and Claudio Monteverdi
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano, Päivi Järviö, Johannes Boer, Dinko Fabris, Mauro Calcagno, Björn Ross, Charulatha Mani, Elisabeth Holmertz
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
A Music Research Seminar
honouring Accademia degli Incogniti
and Claudio Monteverdi
Palazzo Grimani, Venice
15 June 2017
Nordic Network for Early Opera and Nordic Network for Vocal Performance Research, in collaboration with Scuola di Music Antica Venezia, are delighted to invite you for a performance seminar in Venice 15 June around the theme of vocality, music drama and the vibrant intellectual / artistic scene in Venice around Monteverdi and Accademia degli Incogniti. The idea comes from a desire to offer a fringe-event / sub-encounter / prologue for (among others) participants of the two symposia co-happening in Venice 16-17 June: The Foundazione Cini conference on Monteverdi (16-17 June) and the symposia "Encounters, Discussions, Experimentations: Art, Research and Artistic Research in Music”, the Research Pavilion of the University of the Arts Helsinki, Venice Biennale 2017 (16-17 June)
We are also hoping to meet anyone interested to explore the fairly new academic field of Artistic Research.
Time:
15 June 2017
15:00-18:30
Venue:
Palazzo Grimani, Ruga Giuffa off Campo Santa Maria Formosa, Venezia,
This essay and audio piece explore how the related experiences of illness and isolation problematize the clear spatial opposition of “outside” and “inside.” Adopting the dialectical models, proposed by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his phenomenological study of outside and inside, I aspire to take aural notice on how the migraine sufferer’s sense of space shifts in sync with her sense of self throughout a migraine attack. Composed out of vocal sounds and domestic noises, recorded in and around the house, this piece merges the materiality of the room and voice in a conversation that balances on the edges of meaning. Juxtaposing one unto the other, both self and space get lost in displacement, matter melts and disappears into one roaring drone.open exposition comments (0)
This exposition departs from the silence of a non-existing voice. A voice about to touch the ears and eyes of both author and readers/listeners. A voice already sounding in the head of the author - sounding as thoughts, words, letters and sentences. A non/voice being part of a never ending development of new materialities. An onto-epistemological voice diffracted through a singer's process of making sense of a lesson from a 17th century vocal manuscript. A voice as a mattering method for the art of singing through new materialist theories, vocal and discursive narratives and somatic awareness.open exposition comments (0)
This project tackles the issue of describing, composing, and perceiving vocality in a synthetic context, highlighting an experiential approach to the perception of a vocal signal. The research primarily focuses on the idea of fusions of sounds, particularly fusions between synthetic and natural voice, where the resulting quality enriches a vocal experience through the ambiguities and multiplicities it brings forth. Design choices and aesthetical considerations of a computer program for vocal synthesis are then discussed in relation to my own approaches to vocal composition.open exposition comments (0)