The Voice and the Lens

This looks great.

The Voice and the Lens at Whitechaple Gallery Sunday 15 June, 12pm - 6pm

The Voice and the Lens at Whitechaple Gallery Friday 13 June, 12pm - 6pm

Also see: http://thevoiceandthelens.com/

Her

I put some thoughts on Spike Jonze's film Her - here

Great List of Publications about Audition and Voice here

http://www.psychology.mcmaster.ca/ljt/publications.htm

Larynx Drop

I put a bunch of thoughts about the Larynx up on my blog, in 5 parts... links:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3 (best gif ever)
Part 4
Part 5

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!

rubbadub dub a dubbed Dybbuk box-office dibbouk

....rubbadub dub a dubbed Dybbuk box-office dibbouk has all the eating, voice horror/ possession horror tropes you could shake a bottle of faux-holy water at. You could see this as a film about puberty, fearing change, vocal change, bodily change etc. But I'd also like to think of the dybbuk box (which in this is film is spliced with the old pandora's box myth to some degree) as an avatar for the shiny little boxes of friends, spirits and voices that kids carry around all day.... the power of the little box becoming their friend before possessing them entirely and taking over their lives.... Anyhow, fun flick, and if you don't fancy hearing Mercedes Cambridge's roars of "Merrin!!!"this is a lighter substitute - it even has some scenes taken directly from Friedkin's classic (the MRSI, is a direct rip - with a pseudo subliminal face emerging to boot).

I'd like to think about the Yampolsky text and this film along with a Michael Jackson/Prince story.    The version presented in the Spike Lee "Bad" documentary tells of how MJ got spooked when Prince brought a voodoo box along to their first meeting - and that is why their collaborative single never quite happened. That is all I know, its a story of hearsay. But I'd like to think it, the box that spooked MJ, was a dybbuk box - a box harbouring a spirit from outside, a change, a possession - a vocal change. Everything that, people say, Michael Jackson (peter pan) was deeply averse to. Prince brought along a box containing the unnerving prospect of uncontrollable physical and vocal change. As one comment in the documentary mentions, MJ had a massive vocal range and would answer the phone in a gruff 'regular' voice - when asked why he doesn't talk like that more often, or sing using his lower vocal range, he replied that he just preferred the other way. MJ spent his life controlling his voice and his body (through gravity defying dance moves, or plastic surgery) - and so he would've had the most to lose, the most voice to lose, the most body to lose, the most control to relinquish, the most reasons for fearing the box that was brought to the meeting.... The Prince's dybbuk box scared The King of Pop away.

Berberian Sound Studio

Peter Strickland's film, Berberian Sound Studio, is pretty relevant to lots of discussions in AVC and ties in nicely with the Mikhail Yampolsky essay.

AGF - Source Voice

Thanks to Alastair at Eleusinian Press for sending me this wire news article

AGF - Source Voice

from the Line Imprint site:

"The voice is the human instrument. Almost everyone has a voice, unique and custom built within them. A voice is personal, political and controllable. Some voices are heard more than others. In expanding the meaning of voice, listening to and deconstructing it, we learn about our body, our kind. We grow and gain awareness through this process.

Composing in a unique way with her voice makes AGF’s work a way to consider humanity. On Source Voice, all sounds are derived from artist’s voice and the room around her. The collaboration with Richard Chartier’s LINE label is based on mutual admiration and follows the aesthetics of minimalism. Source Voice is the second LINE SEGMENTS release.

Inspired by the ancient folk practice of yoik, AGF started to imitate and voice along with her surrounding wind and weather. Yoik is a mostly wordless form of singing/vocalization by the Sami tribe of northern Scandinavia and considered one of the longest living music traditions in Europe.

Through her careful study and work with pioneering composer Eliane Radigue for the past 10 years, AGF further experiments with highly contained and organized sound in the wide field of vocal expression. AGF has worked with Radigue while performing Elemental 3 as The Lappetites, and has now created OCCAM 7, a new composition by Radigue for solo voice.

While only the composition “Kaamos” is pure untreated voice, digital processing was used to bend our imagination of what our voice is and can become."

The Shining - Horror in Voice + Dolar Thoughts

Thought I'd link my posts on voice here, I posted them on my other blog because I didn't want to clog Vocalities up too much with my own stuff. But seeing as all I think about is voice they are kinda relevant, extrinsic ;-) - I've been watching a lot of horror films recently and thinking about voice in horror: clicky for my thoughts

A few of the essays coming up are about cinema so I'm really looking forward to revisiting those with a few horror scenes in mind. - If anyone has a particularly 'eerie' example of V∅ICE in a film scene please let me know. The holiday is a great time to binge on films.

I Re-watched Kubrick's The Shining the other day -  spectral and split subject voices are in almost every scene - kinda felt that the terror, the horror, in that film comes from the uncertainty of it being always either spectral/hotel haunting or a subjective possession - can the Overlook Hotel possess a man or is it just haunting? Is Jack going mad or is he possessed? Is Danny's ESP real or not? Tony is presented as a part of Danny's psyche - a visible split subject voice, his most inner turmoil is flexed inside out for the viewer to see.... but this is against the backdrop of a building that haunts - a haunting that (in the first parts) is reserved only to Danny. By the end of the film the question of the location of the terrors (be it physical, psychological or architectural) actual locations does not actually matter - but it is this uncertainty that maintains such a satisfyingly taut tension for the first two thirds of the film.

Surrounding all this is a soundtrack of (I think mostly in the film it is Ligeti - right?) cacophonies of dissonance. Etherial, ghoulish wafts of pneumacentric presence (choirs) blow through the corridors and up the stairs. Seducing and possessing you - just like the Overlook's resonating corridors (Bronchi and Bronchiole) and room 237 (larynx) did to Jack.. Was he possessed or was he just weak? In an odd way I'd like to think of jack as a failed Orpheus - when he heard the voices he tried to beat them by playing his weapon of logos (the typewriter rather than the lyre), he played it more and more: "all work and no play makes jack a dull boy". But in the end he succumbed to the Siren call - the unseen presence - an unseen that's ambiguity of location (subjective/objective - past/present) only amplifies the uncertainty, the horror to relish.

Also - the 1920's bar tender is obviously the blue-print for that possession from the future Drink Drive advert:

the original had no sound

edit - sorry, got carried away with that film, mean't to post my old thoughts on Dolar - I wanted to let the dust settle on that essay for a while before linking my very subjective comments!

Derrida should've just focused on writing...oh wait, he did!

Alexander G Weheliye, "Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity" from Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity - Wow, what an essay! There is loads in this one, and I'm really only scraping the surface of just the ontological implications of sound in the first few pages..... I found the real sledge hammer as early as page 24...

"Daesein seems to emanate from the repetition and (re)iteration. (boom, this is massive) (...) sound recordings do not secure evidence of preexisting information but "merely" disseminate recoded sounds: they are forever suspended in a circulatory tide.. (...) they are permanently lacking, always secondary (..) prostheses"(pp. 24)

leaving Derrida's suspect and historically dominant graphizing alone and skipping to the next part concerning the sonic/vocal daesein...

"Sound and voice, on the other hand, require an audience to guarantee. legally, epistemologically, and ontologically, their continuing being" (pp. 25)

This is almost the core of the argument for me, starting point, the realisation that leads to the graphing, the scribing of voice and sound being unravelled. Voice and sound are not so much voice and sound outside of the instance of audition -  a text is a text, it is typed up, and if the dead letters are incorrect or divulge too much or too little the scriber can amend before posterity calcifies the words to words.... voice and song on the other hand are not like this. At the moment of their utterance their is a voice, the voice of audition is also a voice - only present at audition, it's meaning, it's presence changes and the options for control, for the speaker, listener and disseminator are subject to the ghost of vocal audition - voice is so much more temporally/emotionally/corporeally subject than any text, and it's Daesein is this, it's being is, it's being a voice almost it's very fact that that it cannot be graphed.... that it changes, is subject to temporal and cultural breezes - it's the exo-matic ontology of sound and voice...

"Hence the written record seems autonomous of any reception and reproduction processes, whereas sound and voice become documents, when and if they do so at all, only in the murky domains of reproduction and reception" (pp. 25)

Skipping back up the the etymology of phonograph, this word, it's etymological construction itself exemplifies the paradoxical core, the impossibility of writing voice.... phone = voice/sound, graph = drawing/writing/recording.

"The the oral and phonetic are written down (recorded) by the "phonograph" (sound writer), imploding the original aperture between writing and sound by calling to attention the improbability of writing sound in any commonsensical manner. The etymology of the "phonograph" and the words used to designate many other 19th century technologies - "photography" (picture writing) and "cinematography" (film writing) - suggest that inscription seems to be at the root of of any kind of recording: more than recording itself, it seems that sound necessitates transposition into writing to even register as technology. The place of script as a preferred, if not dominant, cultural technology in the West makes for the authority that it relays in relation to speech and sound, which, in contrast to writing, have to be reiterated and imagined as writing in oder to operate as recordings; sonic recordings are the means rather than the end to a status as record."

If I type a text, and email it or print it off and hand it to a friend, it is a text, I do not need to call it a textographic document, no -  it is just text. However, if I record sound, voice, cinema, or light, it needs to always be the shackled to an absurd (especially incase of sonic phenomena - occularcentricism?) scriptic suffix - it is always "phonography", "cinematography", or "photography"... Admittedly graphy can also mean drawing, but this still leaves the former of the 3 hostages of writings dominance utterly absurd - one cannot draw or write sound/voice - but we keep bolting this incompatible suffix onto the end because (as Dolar outlined too) there has been the dominance of writing throughout western metaphysical tradition.

I see graphy (text, script, words, writing, drawing too) as consisting of an almost endomatic-ontology it is itself, it is being in itself, whilst still on the shelf.... and sonic/voco phenomena as consisting of exomatic ontologies - their Daesein come from very different places. However their has been a privilege given to the endomatic daesein as far as recording information is concerned, or rather recoding information as been presumed as having to be endomatic (that I do not believe  - ever read an essay twice? I'll leave that for the time being though....)

Ironically, the ill named phonograph has been key to undoing this tyranny of the endo-matic / text - graphy-centric. The copyright wars are a example given of this given in the text:

"For instance, in a discussion about The Musical Copyright Act of 1909 (the first such act to include recorded music), Lisa Gitelman shows that the central debate concerned the split between sound and vision, especially writing, in the phonograph. Since musical copyright law was heretofore based on sheet music, in order for recorded music to function as intellectual property, composers - performers did not even merit a footnote - had to prove that the phonograph read their music in the same or similar way as did consumers who who played the music from printed scores" (pp. 28)

"Record companies, in particular,in order to claim all the profits from the record sales, argued that phonograph records did not represent written embodiments of the composer's score since they were not legible by humans"(pp. 28)

"The dispute over the Copyright Act revolved aroundwhether recordings based on the copyrighted sheet music merely represented the use of the score or a particular performance of a composition as opposed to an altogether different material manifestation of music" (pp. 28)

The phonograph caused a rupture, a rupture between things that can be written and things that cannot. Previously many things that ought to be uttered or heard or sung were forced into a position of being written - ironically the phonograph emancipated the sonic from the signified, this piece of technology utterly exploded the arena of the symbol, and in the ruins people sensed, heard, and experienced that which was previously thought to be no more than akin to the text I'm typing now. Isn't technology powerful? I'd like to take a phonograph back to greece around 350 bc and show it to Aristotle and Plato - I wonder what they would say about the sonorous "ontological doppleganger" - I expect that they would be "not so much interested in hearing their own recorded voices as those of singers and comedians, perhaps because the voice, even more so than writing, represents pure interiority and the proper domain of the sovereign human subject" (pp. 27).

""to go on record" (...) - here the ontological authority of writing meets it's doppelganger in the annals of patent law." (pp. 26) - How often is sound, pure sound and voice used in law nowadays as a signature, thinking of wire-taps, nixon tapes, phone hacking, voice recognition software, vocal disguises etc etc etc