Voice

Readings, Listenings, Viewings

Laurie Anderson, “O Superman.”

Holly Herndon, “AI Baby.”

Alvin Lucier, “I Am Sitting in a Room.”

Radiohead, “Fitter Happier.”

Reflections

Joseph Auner, “Sing It for Me: Posthuman Ventriloquism in Recent Popular Music.”

Dominic Pettman, “The Cybernetic Voice.”

Questions

The last two weeks, we have considered voices from contestable sources, animals and instruments; this week we strike out into the very contemporary territory of digital voice processing and voice synthesis. Electronic voices will put our definitional questions to one final test. If, as Maestro Dudamel suggested, all music aspires to the condition of voice—why alter that voice? How far can it be changed, and in what ways, and still be ours? Can a machine have a voice? (Putting pressure both on ideas of expression, and of individuality.) How might the potential of digital processing allow us to experiment with aspects of voice that seem natural, including gender? Majel’s TC-Helicon VoiceLive Touch has a gender knob. We’ll try twisting it.

Exercises

Two this week. 1) Prepare to talk briefly, i.e. 2-3 minutes, about your final-project-in-process. We’ll spend the second half of class sharing them with one another, to get some preliminary feedback, generate and develop ideas, possibly do some casting, etc. 2) Send us, by 9 AM Tuesday, an artificial voice you’re interested in. It need not be one you have made yourself, nor is any commentary required. We just want an anthology to work with when 1:30 rolls around, some voices we have never heard.

Readings, Listenings, Viewings

Ludwig von Beethoven, Große Fuge, Op. 130 (score here).

Hector Berlioz, Harold in Italy.

Sergei Prokofiev, Peter & the Wolf (score here).

Steve Reich, Different Trains (part III).

Reflections

Ed Cone, “A Lesson from Berlioz,” in The Composer’s Voice (pp. 81-114).

Joseph Kerman, “Voice,” in The Beethoven Quartets (pp. 191-200 only).

John Tresch and Emily Dolan, “Toward a New Organology.”

Questions

This past week, one of our points of discussion was the extent to which we humans style our interaction with things/objects based on the way we interact with other humans. To what extent do the voices of Others—animals, things, the planet—rely on an implicit or explicit connectedness to human beings to be vocal? This week we extend that question to musical instruments. We might start with the concept of an organology, the system for classifying instruments, which sounds as though it could refer to a different kind of organ, and a different body. (Not required, but when you have more time, check out the Hornbostel-Sachs classificatory categories, which sound to our modern ears like they could refer to the four ways human beings interact with their devices: idiophones, membranophones, chordophones, and aerophones.) In your readings this week, we revisit the idea from Frith that in live or recorded music there are a multitude of voices jockeying for our attention—the voice of the author, the voice of the performer, the voice of the protagonist, etc. In the Kerman and Cone readings, what is at stake when it comes to the question of whose voice speaks when? You may also wish to think a bit about how the voice of the conductor fits into this choral agon, and how it interacts with the voice of the orchestra. Like a pop star, the success of a conductor in the music industry is inextricable from the “persona” they develop (Cone’s word), and the persona of the orchestra that develops under their influence.

Exercise

The exercise this week follows the old form of the “double translation,” often used to teach classical languages. So, take a passage of Latin, and translate it into English; sometime later, take your translation and, without consulting the original, translate it back into Latin. Your task is to undertake such a double translation from the voice of an instrument, into English, and back again. So, 1) begin with a short passage of music as played by a solo instrument, a snatch of a sonata, a guitar solo, whatever you choose. Next, 2) translate that passage into English. Your latitude in translation is wide: you can make sense of what the instrument says, mimic its sounds, or, ideally, both; but you must use English words to do so. Finally, 3) take your translation, and translate it back into the voice of an instrument, not necessarily the same instrument. Here again your latitude is wide: you can perform on any instrument you consider to have a voice (from a violin to the wind), or manipulate a recording. You should provide recordings for 1) and 3) and a text for 2), along with the usual 200-300 word description of what you have done, why you have done it, and what it means, drawing from the theoretical readings for the week.

Readings, Listenings, Viewings

John Luther Adams, Wind Garden and Wind in High Places.

Nina Katchadourian, “Natural Car Alarms,” “Talking Popcorn,” “Talking Popcorn’s Last Words.”

Radiolab, “Septendecennial Sing-along” and “Hello.”

R. Murray Shafer, “Listen.”

Some animals: Blu, Peaches, Max, Sparkie Williams, Alex, and a Fawn Breasted Bowerbird that lives by a construction site in Papua New Guinea.

Reflections

Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (pp. 14-41). 

Dominic Pettman, “The Creaturely Voice” and “The Ecological Voice,” in Sonic Intimacy (pp. 51-78).

R. Murray Schafer, from The Soundscape (pp. 88-91).

Questions

Throughout the semester, we have been thinking about the human voice; sometimes, the voice as distinctively, even definitively human. What happens to our understanding of it if we explore the boundaries between our voices and the voices of other species, even of other things? How far does the metaphor stretch—the voice of the wolf, of the wild, of the earth—and indeed, is it merely a metaphor? Among the readings, Shafer and Pettman are on point with our vocal preoccupations. Latour is not talking directly about voice, but he has an important modern philosophical project to enfranchise things—to give them a voice in politics. So, our concerns with what animals and things sound like will continue our questions last week about voice, representation, individuality, ability and disability.

Exercise

Undertake a vocal collaboration with an animal or a thing. The collaboration can involve a living animal or an actual thing, in real time, or a recording. Plants count, for our purposes—indeed anything counts that is not a human being, so long as you can get it to speak (or perhaps we should say, give voice). One way or another, the collaboration should test the question of whether, in fact, animals or things have voices; and/or whether voice, or some aspect of voice, is a way of distinguishing us (us?) from them (them?). As usual, your submission can take the form of text, audio, video, or some combination, and as usual, it should be accompanied by 200-300 words of comment on what you have done and its relation to the week’s reading.

Readings, Listenings, Viewings

George Frideric Handel, Messiah (dir. Guth, 2009). Available for streaming on our Blackboard site under “Reserves.” Please pay special attention to the work of the supernumerary characters, both the signing woman and the male dancer, and the chorus scenes, in particular:

And remember to bear in mind the difference between the original by Handel (unstaged, religious oratorio, involving anonymous choral singers) and the directorial hand of Guth (staged, secular, stage populated with characters of the director’s devising.

Yoko Ono, “Voice Piece for Soprano.”

Jordan Scott, from Blert (2008), preface and excerpt.

Reflections

Adriana Cavarero, “A Vocal Ontology of Uniqueness” and “Logos and Politics,” in For More than One Voice (pp. 173-96).

Mladen Dolar, “The Ethics of the Voice” and “The Politics of the Voice,” in A Voice and Nothing More (pp. 83-124).

Brandon Labelle, “Lisp, Mumble, Mute, Pause, Stutter,” in Lexicon of the Mouth (pp. 129-46).

Questions

This week, we begin a sequence of two classes that make central a recurring theme, the politics of voice. For of course, in addition to denoting babble, talk, speech, singing, shouting, and other vocal projections, the word “voice” gets used for political representation. To have a voice is to claim a place in the polis or the public sphere; to be voiceless is to be unrepresented, and powerless. What does the political voice have to do with the other, material voices we have auditioned, and produced, so far? (“Material”: a flawed word, as we have seen, and one we should continue to interrogate.) For Tuesday, we will approach the question particularly through vocal disability, what it means to have a voice that is impeded, imperiled, even silenced, or almost silenced. Think, as you read, about the freedom to speak (sing, chant, cry, etc.) as a freedom of voice, and about the various constraints that may be placed on that voice, constraints of practical, political liberty; of the body, of the mind, or of the larynx between them; or even of identity itself.

Exercise

Step 1: Take a text, any text—you’re encouraged to use something related to the course, the better to show/share, but your text can be any monologue, dialogue, voiceover, libretto, poem, rejection letter, shopping list, someone’s Twitter feed, etc. Step 2: Pass that text through a devoicing filter of your own invention. The filter should be designed to compromise, handicap, or mute some aspect of the voice of the text. 

Bear in mind that silence is often the most powerful part of a performance (the moment just before a performance begins, pauses between phrases, gaps or omissions in delivery). Also bear in mind that silent voices still have ways to make themselves heard. Your exercise can involve prosthetic voices, and/or voices that do not speak or sing per se, but are otherwise abled.

Your submission can take the form of text and/or audio recording (we specially encourage trying to make the sound), and readiness for an in-class performance would be welcome. As usual, accompany your exercise with a commentary on your motives and method.

Readings, Listenings, Viewings

Peter Maxwell Davies, Eight Songs for a Mad King. This one is easier to watch,  but have a look at this one, too; and have a look at the score.

Luciano Berio, Sequenza III  for Voice.

Kate Soper, Only the Words Themselves.

Ken Ueno.

Tanya Tagaq/Kronos Quartet, Nunavut.

Reflections

Adrian Curtain, “Alternative Vocalities,” Mosaic 42.2 (2009): 101-17.

Enrique Pardo,  “Figuring Out the Voice: Object, Subject, Project,”
Performance Research, 8.1 (2003): 41-50.

Michael Poizat, “‘The Blue Note’ and ‘The Objectified Voice and the Vocal Object,” Cambridge Opera Journal, 3.3 (1991): 195-211.

Questions

This week we transition from a focus on opera to what might be called anti-opera. Last week we pondered opera as a site where voice and pleasure readily intersect. In a 20th-century post-war context, however, composers of opera began to investigate ways of moving beyond pleasure in art — beyond beauty, beyond melody, beyond bel canto — and the voice became a major locus of this investigation. Two essays for this week — by Enrique Pardo and Adrian Curtain — center on one of the 20th century’s most infamous works: the barely performable, vocally exertional Eight Songs for a Mad King. Please be prepared to agree or disagree with Curtain about whether Eight Songs represents a “queering” of the voice. And in Pardo’s article, pay attention to a general celebration of “broken voices.” (Sound familiar from Koestenbaum? Are we really so far from bel canto after all? What is the particular quality of brokenness being celebrated here?) For Michel Poizat, Koestenbaum’s Lacanian doppelgänger, moving “Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera” means asking ourselves some deeply troubling questions about our attachment to voice and brokenness: why do we find ecstatic pleasure in an art form involving suffering, death, and a kind of vocal exertion that sometimes resembles screaming? As with Koestenbaum, be on the alert in Poizat for a negative relationship between the operatic voice and writing, and definitely ready yourselves to explain what the heck a “Blue Note” is!

Exercise

Develop an extended vocal technique suited to a particular dramatic situation. You can choose the situation from an existing opera, one we have studied or one you know; or from any text that you think might be adapted to an opera. You should 1) describe the situation, and include the text you are setting (it can be a relatively short passage); 2) describe the technique; and 3) make a brief recording of the technique in action (performed by yourself, by yourself in collaboration with others, or adapted or altered from a source in recorded sound, coaxed from an animal, etc. etc.). And then of course 4) the usual commentary on the whole operation. The technique, of course, is the heart of the matter, and describing it could involve the full range of linguistic possibility we have so far used to describe voice, from the technical to the metaphorical—but as best you can, make it a description that would allow readers to try out the technique for themselves.

Readings, Listenings, Viewings

Mozart, Marriage of Figaro (Salzburger Festspiele, dir. Guth, cond. Harnoncourt, 2006  Unitel). Available for streaming on our Blackboard site under “Reserves”; and here is a link to a translation of the libretto, useful for the exercise below.

Sarah Hennies, Contralto.

Reflections

Heather Hadlock, “Peering into The Queen’s Throat,” Cambridge Opera Journal 5.3 (1993): 265-75.

Heather Hadlock, “The Career of Cherubino, or the Trouser Role Grows Up,” in Siren Songs (67-92).

Wayne Koestenbaum, “The Queen’s Throat, Or How to Sing,” from The Queen’s Throat (pp. 154-75).

OPTIONAL: Elizabeth Wood, “Sapphonics,” in Queering the Pitch (pp. 27-66).

Questions

Welcome, friends, to opera week, which might also be known as “voice and sex” week, since, in opera, battles are waged over the connections between voice, gender and desire, both onstage and off. For Wayne Koestenbaum, the operatic voice is a fantasy surrogate that aligns him, the adoring gay fan, with his chosen diva. How does he perform this neat trick, and what, for Koestenbaum, is the connection between writing, singing and being gay? Koestenbaum’s queering of opera is challenged by Heather Hadlock, both for a lazy equation of “gay” and “queer,” and for his paradoxical “exclusion of women” from his brand of queerness. Does Hadlock’s critique seem fair?

As you watch the Salzburg Festival production of Marriage of Figaro this week, pay attention to how opera on film is different from other kinds of film. Generally speaking, in cinema, verisimilitude counts — to play the part, you have to look it. But in opera, as Hadlock writes, we “look through or disregard a singer’s body and instead ‘see’ the voice.” What does this mean, and, if Hadlock is right that we visually discard operatic bodies, then why all the emphasis on sex? What exactly is this strange brand of sex we encounter in opera? A “third sex,” as Hadlock suggests? What does it mean that, for Koestenbaum, “Homosexuality is a way of singing”?

Exercise

For this exercise, we ask you to change the gender of a scene in Le Nozze di Figaro. What does that mean, “change the gender”? It could mean changing the gender of one or more characters—not necessarily (though possibly) their biological sex, certainly their orientation and expression. It could mean changing, or complicating, the gender of the scene itself, of the music or the scenography or the plot. The general idea is to take advantage of the gender mobility of opera to experiment with its vocal materials. You might rewrite a portion of the libretto, or provide new scenography or stage directions in prose; you might also record or film an illustrative sample. Our readings for the week provide resources for thinking about what it means for opera to be queer, or to queer an opera, though other gender possibilities are on the table, too. Whatever you do, let voice be the center of your concerns; be thoughtful, respectful, generous, curious; and provide the usual 300 words of comment explaining what you are up to.

Readings, Listenings, Viewings

This week, we’ll listen to a lot of songs. A few to start us off: Billie Holiday, Strange Fruit (important for the Eidsheim article); Sam Amidon, Wild Bill Jones; Danny Kaye, Inchworm; Judy Garland, Somewhere over the Rainbow; The Smiths, Well I Wonder; Prince, When Doves Cry; Joni Mitchell, A Case of You; Ella Fitzgerald, Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive; Neil Young, The Needle and the Damage Done; Bjork, There’s More to Life than This; Radiohead, The National Anthem. As you can see, this is impossible!

Reflections

Nina Sun Eidsheim, “Bifurcated Listening,” in The Race of Sound (pp. 151-76).

Simon Frith, “Voice” and “Performance,” from Performing Rites (pp. 183-202,  203-25).

Questions

This week’s readings take us deeper into issues of sound and source. If all voice is acousmatic voice, as Dolar would have it—i.e. all voices ultimately drift free of their sources—we must put to ourselves the provocative question: to what extent is voice autobiographical? Our terrain this week is popular music and a dangerous assumption that guarantees the success of much pop music, that in this music we can hear the pop singer “singing herself” (Frith). In other words, that we hear her voice and can immediately “summarize [her] life story” (Eidsheim). Resisting this slippery collapse of voice and identity, Frith and Eidsheim urge us instead to listen in a “bifurcated,” de-essentializing way. That is, we must learn to listen acousmatically, on multiple levels, both to the “singer in the song” and “the singer on the stage” (Frith) and to know the difference between them. There is in the background of this week the ever-lurking notion that voice should both seem to promise that it can be known, and to resist that knowing, thus guaranteeing the continued circulation of Lacanian jouissance (pleasure) for you, dear listener!

Exercise

No exercise, given midterms. (You’re welcome!) Just send us a link to a song with a voice that compels you—we’ll rummage around the recommendations as we go.

Readings, Listenings, Viewings

The principal text for this week is the February edition of Poetry magazine (handed out in class last week; if you missed a copy, there are a couple in the mailbox outside Jeff’s office, McCosh 33; and you can get an awkward but complete version online.)

Reflections

Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” from Image, Music, Text (pp. 179-89).

Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Limited Inc. (pp. 1-23).

Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Gay Science (§290).

Richard Wollheim, from “Pictorial Style: Two Views” (pp. 186-91).

Questions

This week, another sense of that Protean term voice, the voice of the author, the voice on the page. Another word for it: style. Our principal example is the latest issue of Poetry magazine, which strives to be ecumenical, and contains poems of many different schools, traditions, factions, fashions, etc. We’ll want to use some of our class time to think about the different voices we hear there, how to describe and distinguish them, what differences and what affinities we discover. Come prepared to propose a particular poem to the class, and to start a discussion about its characteristics and where it might be said to fit in the volume as a whole. (The rhetoric week might afford some vocabulary, though we’ll have to reach for other resources, too.) The secondary readings all one way or another approach the question of what counts as an individual voice. Nietzsche gives a full-throated defense of the importance of having a style of your own; Roland Barthes grounds the voice in a particular body; Richard Wollheim is talking about painting, but his discussion of individual style is a useful, philosophical approach to what we mean by such acts of recognition and singling out. The Derrida is more background for the discussion, and in furtherance of our interest in poststructuralism—you’ll see his affinities with Dolar and Chion and in back of them, Lacan. We can hope that the discussion will start to focus an area of interest in previous discussions, what it means to sound like yourself. (And of course, like other people.) Perhaps the individuality of voices and the individuality of faces will occupy us, too.

Exercise

In the spirit of last week’s ventriloquism, this week’s exercise asks you to produce one poet’s poem from the mouth (or pen) of another. What might this mean? Let’s take two poets encountered already in this class. Say that we wanted to rewrite Ovid in the voice of Gertrude Stein. To do so, we might first consider what elements of Ovid a poet like Stein might take to be quintessentially Ovidian—would she home in on the form of address, the length and organization of a line, the non-rhyme? Or is it the cool distance, what he gives and what he withholds that most interests her? Next, decide how Stein might then re-voice Ovid in her own Steinian idiom. You’ve had a bit of practice with this before! The exercise from Week 3 invited you to take an extant non-rhetorical text and make it rhetorical, which is one way of recasting one voice in the voice of an imagined other. This week, you should choose two poems you are interested in from our issue of Poetry, and rewrite one in the voice of the other. So, for example, take Petit Pascale’s “Sky Ladder” as your model; now write it in the voice of Monica Youn’s “Study of Two Figures,” which would mean expanding the short terse lines of the first into the long prose-blocks of the second, transforming and augmenting the language as necessary, catching the sound of Youn. You can choose any two poems. The more different they are, the better! As usual, your exercise should include a 200- to 300-word explanation of your inspiration and your methodology.

Readings, Listenings, Viewings

The Conversation (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1974): available on the course Blackboard site under “Reserves.”

Film excerpts: Candy Colored Clown, from Blue Velvet (dir. David Lynch, 1986); casting call and Llorando, from Mulholland Drive (dir. David Lynch, 2001); the wizard, from The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939);  the deactivation of Hal, from 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968).

Reflections

Michel Chion, “Prologue: Raising the Voice” and “Chapter 1: Magic and Powers of the Acousmêtre,,” from The Voice in Cinema (pp. 1-14; 15-29).

Steven Connor, “What I Say Goes,”from Dumbstruck (pp. 3-43).

Mladen Dolar, “The Physics of the Voice,” from A Voice and Nothing More (pp. 59-81).

Questions

Humans have been fascinated by the idea that a voice could detach from a body well before the dawn of motion picture (which, you’ll recall, initially was silent). If, with the help of film and its cultural dominance, we got used to the notion that voices and bodies could part from one another, we might still wonder whether we ever got comfortable with it. In this week’s readings, we’ll encounter familiar words like soundtrack, voiceover, and overdub—some of the ways of substituting recorded voice for live voice in filmmaking—as well as less familiar terms like “acousmêtre” (Chion) and “object voice” (Dolar). For Chion and Dolar, words like these hint at the uncanny feeling that arises when voices become disembodied, a discomfort that film, perhaps above all other media, is happy to exploit. Thus! Both in reading this week and in watching/listening, we become familiar with a variety of wonderfully bodiless voices, and speculate at what disembodiment does to/for voices—does it free or enhance them, vex or empower them? How do we pin down the source of uncanniness, when it arises? How do we describe it? How can a voice be an object? And what, pray tell, is the “object voice” anyway? Be prepared to answer this last question!

Exercise

Exercise: compose a minute (or more) of acousmatic voiceover. That is, make a voice heard in a setting where it is not diagetically present, as a sport-caster does, or a detective in a film noir, or a singer on the soundtrack, etcetera. Your aim—and you can draw on the full range of examples and theories in play this week—is to set up a challenging, provocative relation between the sound of a represented space and the voice voiced over it. Your submission could take the form of a script which identifies the scene, and transcribes the voiceover; or a recording to be played in tandem with and event, or in a particular place at a particular time, or over another recording or a video; or, if you have the technical chops for it, a video with embedded sound etc. All formats equally valued. As always, please provide two- to three-hundred words of commentary, which should situate your project in relation to the readings for the week.

Readings, Listenings, Viewings

Martin Luther King, “I Have a Dream.” You should also listen to the recording. 

Abraham Lincoln, “The Gettysburg Address.” You can hear the speech read aloud by many different voices here. 

Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation.” You can hear Stein read on her page at PennSound; you might give a listen in particular to her rendition of “How She Bowed to her Brother.”

Zadie Smith, “Smith, On Optimism and Despair.”

Reflections

Richard Lanham, “The Divisions of Rhetoric.”

Richard Lanham, from “The Rhetorical Ideal of Life.”

Quintilian, from Institutio Oratoria.

David Gissen, “Listening to a Speech.”

Questions

From the wilds of babble and nonsense (whether pre- or postlinguistic), we turn this week to the discipline of rhetoric, the art of persuasion. We use the term “rhetoric” freely today to refer to formally, politically persuasive speech, and often we use it with a certain suspicion, as though it were necessarily opposed to natural or authentic expression. For centuries in the West, however, its principles were at the very center of humanist curriculum, and they linger in the teaching of public speaking, and writing. Our ur-source will be Quintilian, the first-century Roman rhetorician, whose Institutio Oratoria is among the most influential ancient rhetorical texts. As you read his account of voice, consider what he takes voice to be, and how it can be shaped, and to what ends. What is the voice for? What is its power? Is there anything dangerous about it? Are the principles that Quintilian presents for everyone to use? Who has a voice in this book? What is the relation of voice to text, voice to gesture? For larger context, consider the Richard Lanham essays. The excerpt from “The Rhetorical Ideal of Life” gives a sympathetic account of what it is like to take rhetoric as your basic equipment for living. You need not memorize the pages on “The Divisions of Rhetoric,” but they will give you a sense of the elaboration of the art in its full extent, and the pdf concludes with definitions of a few schemes and tropes. Take a look at parataxis, hypotaxis, isocolon, and chiasmus in particular. We’ll have an eye out for them as we consider our primary texts. As for those primary texts, we’ll think about their voices, what is distinct about them and where they seem to activate common principles, and what those principles might be; and the relation between the text on the page, and the performance.

Exercise

Rewrite a found text in the form of oratory. This may involve any text of your choosing (song lyrics, children’s rhyme, newspaper article, Twitter feed etc.) so long as the original is not intended as oratory, and is at least 250 words long. As usual, the exercise may be submitted in textual form or—if you choose—as an audio or video file (or all of these!) Again, as usual, your exercise should come equipped with a 200- to 300-word addendum describing your inspiration and goals for it (including any noteworthy surprises, hilarities or hindrances, etc. encountered along the way). Please be prepared to proudly declaim your oratory if called upon to do so in class and/or be prepared to declaim someone else’s, if you are enlisted on their behalf. Please submit your work no later than 9pm on Monday evening of next week, and bring a copy of anything that can be copied on paper.