My 4 voice/horror tropes

Finally got round to posting something about my 4th trope, a-linguistic sounds of transformation. It's all about the grain basically. The trope overview sums up the latter 3.

a-linguistic corporeal sounds of transformation

Split subject voice

Dislocated/Relocated voices

Spectral Acousmatic Voice

trope overview

Aristotle on Hiccups + Artaud + Bane

Sup phonephiles.

I got it totally wrong in the seminar. It is Aristotle who makes the distinction between voice and bodily sounds as that of soul in breath...

“Voice then is the impact of the inbreathed air against the “windpipe,” and the agent that produces the impact is the soul resident in these parts of the body. Not every sound, as we have said, made by an animal is voice (even with the tongue we may merely make a sound which is not voice, or without the tongue as in coughing); what produces the impact must have soul in it and must be accompanied by an act of imagination, for voice is a sound with a meaning, and is not merely the result of any impact of the breath as in coughing; in voice the breath in the windpipe is used as an instrument to knock with against the walls of the windpipe. (Aristotle 2001, De Anima, 420b 28-37)” (Dolar, 2006, pp. 23)

If Bane's voice is modulated by analgesic gas then one could argue that he does not have a pure voice. He has a techno-pnematically modulated cyborg voice - making Bane even more of a true cinematic character.

 Not only is the source (the oral void) absent from the image on screen, suspending his act in a corporeal - half-way house between traditional voice forms-within-cinema (acousmatic and non-acousmatic - but of course all cinema voices ARE acousmatic - that's the illusion). But his voice is also, just like every other film character, technologically modulated - amplified. Bane is traditional cinematic vocal operation embodied, or rather the operations of cinematic voice uncovered and summed and ciphered into a body on screen, stuck inside the diegesis - horrifically. The source of his voice is hidden and his sonic is altered too - pure cinema!
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ALSO

Antonin Artaud  - "To have done with the judgment of God" 

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!