Voice Words (Orange House by the Sea Residency)

…but words fail us when we are faced with the infinite shades of the voice, which infinitely exceed meaning. It is not that our vocabulary is scanty and its deficiency should be remedied : faced with the voice, words structurally fail .(Mladen Dollar, 2006, Loc 221)

A soundthinking experiment that is a collaboration between conscious, unconscious and machine minds.

Research fuelled (human) automatic (authormatic) writing is generated in response to sounds improvised with a soft modular synth. The text is then spoken by my AI Voice. The text is further machine composed using random functions to create a shifting assemblage of polyphonic thoughts with chance interconnections.

[In reference to ancient and medieval Christian thought that still had repercussions on our/my contemporary consciousness] Furthermore, the voice beyond sense is selfevidently equated with femininity, whereas the text, the instance of signification, is in this simple paradigmatic opposition on the side of masculinity. (Mladen Dolar, 2006, Loc 712).

Orange House by the Sea Residency is courtesy of Chamber Made and the Estate of Margaret Cameron.

I acknowledge the tradition custodians of the land on which I am currently residing, the Boonwurrung Balag clan of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respect to elders past, present and those to come and offer my sincere gratitude to be able to experience the wonder of their country. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

Reference

Dolar, M. (2006). A Voice and Nothing More. MIT Press.

When I Use My Voice (Orange House by the Sea Residency)

A little Sunday afternoon improvisation pondering things about this and that…

Well specifically I’ve been pondering the voice, my voice, and my love-hate relationship with it. How, after being a singer-songwriter, when I started to make experimental music I actively avoided using my voice. Part of this was pragmatic: I didn’t yet know how to successfully do that live. Part strategic: of the few women doing experimental electronics at the time , there was a tendency to use voice—no disrespect intended as they they were doing amazing things—but I wanted to try to not easily be pushed into that category.

It has also always annoyed me that, certainly back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were basically only two touchstones to be compared to. If you used your head voice you were compared to Kate Bush, and if you let your voice crack, were trying to be Bjork. (Not that I am immodestly suggesting my warbles sound like any of these – Enya maybe?). It was an an easy shorthand that restricted the context for our own voices. While this was lazy it also indicated the gender imbalance of the pop world that basically allowed only a handful of women to be visible. It then relegated most of them to pop, the lighter weight, contemporary music form when compared to rock (Thompson, 2016).

So this is a little improvisation between an 0-coast drone, my live voice and my AI self who speaks texts. The AI texts are spoken and mixed live, that is, the looping is done though the manipulation of the text file (in Descript) rather than cutting up audio files in Live which means I “play” the text. I didn’t know it was going to go to this place when I started, which is the joy of improvising.

It is/I am a work in progress.

Orange House by the Sea Residency is courtesy of Chamber Made and the Estate of Margaret Cameron.

I acknowledge the tradition custodians of the land on which I am currently residing, the Boonwurrung Balag clan of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respect to elders past, present and those to come and offer my sincere gratitude to be able to experience the wonder of their country. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

orangehouseGP2023 · When I Use My Voice

Reference

Thompson, M. (2016). Feminised Noise and the ‘Dotted Line’ of Sonic Experimentalism. Contemporary Music Review, 35(1), 85–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176773

Braids

I write adjectives about sound. (More on this soon.)

I use the words intertwined, twining, twisting.

I  say plaiting because that is the word I learnt as child, when I took three sections of hair, crossing the right over the centre and pulling the centre right. Crossing the left over the centre (which was the right) pulling it to the left. I think of this because I am currently trying to plait my hair like the young people do — to get through a difficult growth period. The world now calls it braiding.

And I think of how sound can be braided.

Three sounds – to be literal – one left, one centre, one right. Their paths crossing in an orderly fashion. Or their frequencies momentarily combining, absorbing each other and separating again?

Imagining the sound of a tightly tied braid…

And what is a braid of words?

sound  art  word

art  sound  word

art  word  sound

word  art  sound

word  sound  art

sound  word  art

sound  art  word

PS – I categorise this in unravellings – though it’s all about the ravel.