Dr Phibes, the inverted ventriloquist?

A ventriloquists dummy adopts life through a voice given to it. Dr Phibes cinematic appearance is the morbid inversion of this. The watcher knows that the voice is supposed to come from Dr Phibes, and indeed, knows that it does - but is given no animate correlate to the voice. The voice is half way between the standard talkie formulation (a voice coming from a seen source) and acousmatic (a sound with an unknown source). Dr Phibes grim mask (masking any vitalism) cleaves a horror between the two poles of cinematic vocalic formal norms.

The Acousmatic/Ventriloquised Voice of Mercedes McCambridge in The Exorcist

Mercedes McCambridge - listen from 05:55.

then.

The Exorcist Scene Dissected:

Watch from 1:56 first then go back to the first scene - better that way!

Robot Whispers, ASMR: A void being close

After creating a technologically augmented ASMR piece for the English Heretic event with Carey I've been thinking about the reasons why intimacy and strange feelings are conjured.  For ordinary ASMR I expect this is mostly due to misguided and unacknowledged reactions to occularcentric, heteronormative and tertiary capitalism norms. For an example of the fodder for such bad conflations of innocent autonomous responses and an aesthetic and affect indebted to a conditioning from the worst tropes of hegemony see the below:


 But is there a cyborg ASMR voice? In an apt conceptual reversal of feigning closeness the whisper voice synthersizer (available on all text to voice readers) is just what the typical ASMR whisper is. The synthetic whisper voice is essentially a de-toned and noised out voice - noise is added. This should create a distance - but in an odd way I feel that it creates a closeness. But making a synthetic voice hide behind a gauze of noise a longing intimacy is conjured on cyborgian terms. I feel this resonates with the deluded fans of actual ASMR whisperers - despite the whisperers delivery being shot through with occularcentric and tertiary service conflations - the fact that their whispering is delivered though a lonely youtube channel must be considered. Is the intimacy of ASMR due to the format of isolation that spawned its popularity? See a nice dramatisation of this in Kate Bush's video for Deeper understanding:



So here I approach the cyborg whisper of intimate distance - the synthetic whisper effect that is a voice hidden behind a gauze of noise. Two particular pop videos come to mind but I'm sure there are more - (I almost feel this cyborgian distance intimacy of the whisper noise effect is a trope.)

Is the distance, the silent, un-admitted distance, mute distance of the isolated position of the listener the object voice of the cyborg?

The voice that:

"embodies the very impossibility of attaining auto-affection, it introduces a scission, a rupture in the middle of the full presence and refers to a void" (Dolar)

"the true object voice is mute (...) and what effectively reverberates is the void: resonance always takes place in a vacuum  - the tone as such is originally a lamentfor the lost object. The object is here as long as the sound remains unarticulated ; the moment it resounds , the moment it is "spilled out," the object is evacuated, and this voidance gives birth to the barred subject ($) lamenting the loss of the object" (Zizek)

I feel that both ASMR and the cyborg whisper trope in music afford an intimacy through technological distance, the lamentation for the distance between object and subject evokes the strange intimacy.

See two nice examples of the cyborg whisper below:
technologically manifested distance keeps the voice feeling close...

Old Words

15000 year old words?

MF Doom and Clams Casino

Here the lazily delivered drawl-raps of MF Doom are paired up with a great example of how Clams Casino uses vocals in his production. Unlike most other producers CC uses the voice as an utter material, a vocal putty to be molded, stretched and twisted. Rather than traditional pop clipped 'samples' of the voice that require framing, CC builds a soundscape from voices. Pretty much all of CC's tracks do this, and some examples are quite overt - but others are quite subtle, the more I listen to a Clams Casino track the more I notice that the sounds are voices - either wailing, croaking or or breathing. His production on Counting (the Robb Bank$ track) is an example of this, synthy soundscapes are actually a cacophony of re-pitched and chrono-dragged wails. Waterfalls (from Clams' Rainforest EP) is a great example of how the grain of the voice is quite resistant to burying, despite being re-pitched, tuned down and smothered in reverb the voiciness of the sound prevails. Natural (from the same EP) shows the same resistance of the grain but against a glitching and jittering digitalisation of the voice. I find it interesting how, despite the sonic of the voice being morphed and degraded out of any semblance to the original, there is still a corporeal grain, still a unique vocality about it. In all of Clams' trax the voice is never quite converted into a chromium synth, wooden timbre or metallic chime but always remains in some sense, regardless of the degrees of sonic manipulation, a very fleshy and erotic voice.

The Mimic

Came across The Mimic in More4 today. Looks to be worth a second watch. Lots of use of the mimicked/disguised voice in identity play - especially in relation the contexts of anxiety and insecurity.... Made me think of Freya Jarman-Ivens essay and talk. Is mimicking (successfully, e.i in situations where the audience does not know one is a mimic - first time encounters, acousmatix etc) running along the same lines as lip-synching identity playing?

Pontone - I Hear Voices mix

I Hear Voices Mix - amazing. Perhaps the best opening voice ever. Even more uncomfortable than the baby cry vocoder on Hype Williams' Rescue Dawn...