Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2016

On 8 December 2013, the monotonous placidity of Singapore’s streets was disrupted by antisocial violence in a district called Little India. Such acts of mass aggression were unheard of in a country whose policies of multiculturalism have been hailed as exemplary for developed nations. This article examines the conditions and consequences of the riot in Singapore and posits that the event signified a rupture in the politics of multicultural practice. It analyses media representations, official state narratives and vitriolic public responses to consider how the voices of the rioters have been violently silenced. Framed by what Georges Bataille terms the dialectic of civilized speech versus silent violence, where silence is regarded as dispossession and objectification, and vocality as empowerment and subjectivity, this article considers the performativities of silence and violence, and the ways the riot is an event of dissensus, a politics of interruption that fractures hegemonic, state-prescribed narratives of multiculturalism.

For the rural poet John Clare (1793-1864), every object has its own voice. Though little commented upon, Clare’s close attention to the sounds of his native Helpston played an important role both as poetic subject and in the formation of his own poetic language. The way these sounds form a part of a larger community for Clare is particularly significant given our contemporary ecological moment in which all sorts of sounds have become and are becoming extinct. He demonstrates how sound is both shaped by space and shapes the space in which it reverberates. Poetry for Clare is therefore a way of both shaping words out of his aural environment and creating spaces for others to listen in. In his mid-period poetry, he develops a unique approach to poetic language through modelling the sounds of the world around him. ‘The Fallen Elm’ (1832) will be examined as emblematic of these concerns, demonstrating an acoustic ecology that offers insight into both the developments of his time and our own.

Heidegger’s radical thought in Being and Time ([1927] 1969) was that sociality is a primordial part of existence. However, as will be seen in this article, it is through the concept of authenticity that this relationality is subsumed into a totalized idea of the community of authentic People. Authenticity becomes intrinsically bound up with this new political destiny; no longer is it death as Dasein’s ownmost possibility, but it becomes community as a work of death, as shown by the genocides that haunt our shared history.

Building upon Nancy’s reorientation of Being and Time as a social ontology, I shall show how, by reading Heidegger’s philosophical opus via vocality and aurality, we are able to reorientate authenticity instead as a relation of shared resonance.

I will show how ‘voice’ can be shown to be a phenomenon that takes a privileged place; what it utters are not words or phrases as such, but it is rather a voice that speaks in between our words, it contaminates them. In short, the voice of the friend speaks the truth of our Being-with others, it calls from a relation between us which is arguably beyond both the phenomenological subject qua philosophical one. The voice opens us up to each other from in-between in an authentic relation of resonance.

In this text, influential voice pedagogue Kristin Linklater offers a set of reflections on the art and craft of voice and speech training. Drawing on a comprehensive outline of her experiences in developing her ‘Sound and Movement’ exercises, the first section charts key developments in voice training, from the understanding of voice as a musical instrument towards an embodied, psycho-physical approach. Offering varied perspectives informed by research on the anatomy and physiology of the voice, alongside decades of practical exploration, the text addresses the necessity of the ‘Actor’s Quartet’: Body, Voice, Intellect and Emotion, collaboratively integrating through the development of creative imagination. The article outlines the psycho-physical foundations of the work and concludes with a detailed, practicebased example of how to free the natural voice through the exploration of sound, resonance, emotion and thought in a Shakespearean excerpt.

Since 2009, non zero one – a London-based collective of artists with a background and interest in theatre but working across media and performance disciplines – has devised a series of unexpected, challenging but also light-hearted and inviting experiences of immersion. Whilst embracing a variety of techniques and contemporary media, one of the key features of the company’s work is the exploration of audience interaction through the use of headphones, typically in promenade and/ or site-specific performance contexts. Following a first section that questions the role of voice in (theatrical) sonic immersion, the text unfolds as a dialogue between practitioner-scholar Konstantinos Thomaidis and non zero one artist and theatre director Sarah Butcher. The interview lends an attentive ear to the role of voice in the company’s work, from pre-recorded instruction to live audio interaction.

The text represents a transcript made from a section of the sound work During the Night Crops will Still Grow (unless the player sleeps), which started with a recording made by one of the artists looking at Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles Apartments shown at the Basel Kunstmuseum in Switzerland in 2013. On the recording, the artist can be heard moving slowly from photograph to photograph. At the same time we hear the voices of the artist and his blind mother discussing the catalogue of the exhibition at her house in Barry, South Wales. The transcript of this conversation translates the rhythms of their voices into text, and thereby returns the work back to its original source in architecture and procedure; grammar and light. For a recent exhibition entitled Nietzsche Cyclists and Mushrooms curated by Heidi Brunnschweiler at the Kunst Raum Riehen, Switzerland, the artists sent each day an image/text via Twitter for display, made with the installation in mind, thereby completing the mental loop that began with the audio recording of Ed Ruscha’s photographs, via the artist’s mother’s mind’s eye and back. The images accompanying this text are examples of such daily interventions. @mollin+voegelin.

Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century, Andrew M. Kimbrough (2011) Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 334 pp. ISBN: 9781604977301, h/bk, $114.99

The Sound Studies Reader, Jonathan Sterne (ed.) (2012) London: Routledge, x + 566 pp. ISBN: 9780415771306, h/bk, $135 ISBN: 9780415771313, p/bk, $49.95

Voice into Acting: Integrating Voice and the Stanislavs ki Approach, Christina Gutekunst and John Gillett (2014) London: Bloomsbury, 384 pp. ISBN: 9781408184509, p/bk, $26.99

Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary, Brandon LaB elle (2014) London: Bloomsbury, 232 pp. ISBN: 9781623560263, h/bk, £50.00 ISBN: 9781623561888, p/bk, £19.99

Voice Studies Now Conference, University of California, Los Angeles, 29–30 January 2015 https://voicestudiesconference.wordpress.com/