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- Volume 1, Issue 2, 2016
Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2016
Volume 1, Issue 2, 2016
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From voice-body to sound-body: A phenomenological approach to the voice
More LessAbstractThis article concerns some phenomenological aspects of the voice with regard to an emergent form of performance embraced by the term Sound Theatre. Beginning from the context of a practical perspective, I discuss the impact of phenomenology on my own experience as a composer/performer. Within this framework my purpose is to define a method of analysis based on elements such as spacetime, memory and identity through an examination of the relationship between performer, voice, technology and audience. I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of gesture, a departure point for understanding the voice-body as medium in performance. Elaborating on this to include its interaction with technology in performance, I recall Hayles’s theory of post-humanism that proposes the existence of a three-way communication between humans, machines and audiences. Placed within a performance context, I argue that the voice itself can assume another presence, one that sheds former conventions and allows for it to speak differently, showing us other aspects of its being in its metamorphosis as a sound-body. Thus acknowledged, it assumes another thinking role within the creative process.
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(Re)authoring the 27 club: Bewildered voices, acousmatic audiophilia and the dangers of listening-in
More LessAbstractThis article considers the limits, layers and potential of vocal mimesis in the creation and performance of a new musical theatre work. Reflecting on the process and production of All That’s Left – a musical that performed imagined conversations between pop-culture icons from ‘The 27 Club’ – I conceptualize voice as a plural space that connects imitation and originality by exposing, negotiating and re-siting the boundaries of mimetic vocality. Specifically, using Hillel Schwartz’s The Culture of the Copy (1996) as a basis for discourse, I offer three readings of vocal mimesis as an act that constructs a space of plural and paradoxical possibilities. First, I consider the fidelity of timbral imitation or accent in ‘singing like the celebrity’, and use Simon Frith in dialogue with Roland Barthes’ concept of the ‘grain’ to explore the paradox of vocal bewilderment in performing original versions of celebrities. Second, I reflect on the use of recorded voice, to suggest that acousmatic voice unveils the limits of mimesis while allowing a sonic (re)authoring in the process. Third, I consider the audience as transgressors, and suggest that in listening-in to the ethereal and imagined thoughts of a long-deceased rock star, they themselves perform the very (re)authoring the mimetic voice offers.
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Extended vocal technique and Joan La Barbara: The relational ethics of voice on the edge of intelligibility
By Gelsey BellAbstractThis article explores vocalist and composer Joan La Barbara’s use of extended vocal technique, and its implications for imagining new kinds of ethical and political relationality with the voice. Focusing on her earliest composition, ‘Voice Piece: One-note internal resonance investigation’ (first premiered in 1974), the article examines her compositional process, tracking its development in the American experimental music tradition, and its relationship to improvisation and embodiment. Working outside of language and celebrating unconventional vocalizations, La Barbara’s music thrives on the dynamics of vocal discovery and mystery, realigning the voice away from customary modes of subjecthood based on speech and paralinguistic primary attributes, and towards a posthumanist vocality that does not seek to resolve all elements of foreignness. Drawing on theories from philosophers like Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler, the political and ethical concerns of the voice are re-examined within the locus of extended vocal technique as seen through La Barbara’s example.
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Singing research: Judaica 1 at The British Library
By Ben SpatzAbstractThis article analyses a performance of Judaica 1 at The British Library in London, part of an ongoing research project to investigate the embodied technique of contemporary (Jewish) identity using a ‘laboratory’ methodology of post-Grotowskian songaction. Through a close analysis of this event, the article seeks to articulate some of the main concepts and questions that underpin the Judaica Project, such as the relevance of social epistemology to fields of embodied knowledge; the ethics and politics of embodied research in culturally defined areas of technique; and the relationship between referential meaning and non-lexical vocal form. Although the Judaica Project focuses specifically on Jewish songs, the proposed synthesis of scholarly epistemology and contemporary performance could have relevance for other projects in which embodied performance materials function both as markers of identity and as unfolding epistemic objects.
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Voice in devising/devising through voice: A conversation with Mikhail Karikis, Elaine Mitchener and Jessica Walker
Authors: Mikhail Karikis, Elaine Mitchener, Jessica Walker and Konstantinos ThomaidisAbstractHow is voice used in devising practices? What is the interplay between structure, freedom and improvisation in such compositional practices? In what ways is voice conceived and practised as material? In providing answers to such questions, this multi-vocal interview/roundtable transcript is composed around the responses of three contemporary vocal artists based in the United Kingdom, Mikhail Karikis, Elaine Mitchener and Jessica Walker. Their work ranges from audio-visual installations and solo shows to immersive performance and site-responsive work, and their deployment of vocality ranges from jazz and Victorian music hall repertoires to extended vocal techniques and experimentations across the speech–song continuum. In conversation with practitioner-scholar Konstantinos Thomaidis, their responses offer valuable insights into current vocal experimentation but are also an invitation to expand discussions around devising in the field of interdisciplinary voice studies.
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Vocalizing Nothingness: (Re)configuring vocality inside the spacetime of Ottavia
More LessAbstractIn 1634, a Venetian academy, Accademia degli Incogniti/Academy of the Unknown, published a discourse on Nothingness, Le Glorie del Niente. Their idea of Nothingness can be simplified to the fact that words were the sparkles of meaning, and immediately when spoken the rational context was transformed into other meanings and purposes. Nothingness was in a sense fragmented but at the same time filled with paradoxes and multiple meanings. A list of figures of Nothingness was formulated by the Academy. Voice was one of them. The purpose of this Voicing is to stage an event where Nothingness becomes a part of a singer’s conscious process into an historical vocal manuscript. This event – being an essay delivered in both written and sounding format – invites the reader to join the singer in her paradoxical journey through words, thoughts and vocality. Her methodological format is built through a continuous questioning into how sensuous experiences of singing and performing can be understood and communicated in words. Theories and vocal practice materialize through one another continuously. The result is a complex poetic event in words and sound, serving as a model for how a voice can develop through a never-ending learning process of vocalizing and theorizing.
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Uluzuzulalia and the ‘Your Vivacious Voice’ project: A first report on collaborating with scientists to elicit children’s extra-normal voices
More LessAbstractUluzuzulalia was a performance for children. It was developed as part of the larger ‘Your Vivacious Voice’ project, undertaken by practice-immersed researcher Yvon Bonenfant. This project aimed to elicit unusual vocalization from children aged 6–11 and their adults, and then celebrate the aesthetic sophistication and unruliness of the resultant sounds, as well as of the temporarily de-disciplined, or perhaps we might say re-disciplined, vocal bodies of the audience. Uluzuzulalia was a performancestyle experience that toured to theatre and music venues. This report article describes some of the key drivers that underpinned the project, articulates some of its results and makes a short, initial assessment of some of the challenges faced by the creative team and the respective solutions that were explored. The article sets the stage for further analytical writing on the project.
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Reviews
Authors: Yvon Bonenfant, Kate Soper, Konstantinos Thomaidis and Zeynep BulutAbstractFOUNDATIONS OF VOICE STUDIES: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO VOICE PRODUCTION AND PERCEPTION, JODY KREIMAN AND DIANA SIDTIS ([2011] 2013) Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 504 pp., ISBN: 9780631222972, h/bk, £89.95; ISBN: 9781118546703, p/bk, £29.95
CATHY BERBERIAN: PIONEER OF CONTEMPORARY VOCALITY, PAMELA KARANTONIS, FRANCESCA PLACANICA, ANNE SIVUOJAKAUPPALA AND PIETER VERSTRAETE (EDS) (2014) Surrey: Ashgate, 249 pp., ISBN: 9781409469834, h/bk, $119.95
SINGING THE BODY ELECTRIC: THE HUMAN VOICE AND SOUND TECHNOLOGY, MIRIAMA YOUNG (2015) 1st ed., Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT, USA: Ashgate, 223 pp., ISBN: 9780754669869, h/bk, $104.95
ON VOICE, WALTER BENHART AND LAWRENCE KRAMER (EDS) (2014) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 252 pp., ISBN: 9789042038219, h/bk, $55.80
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