Tag Archives: material objects

Voice & Materiality

What is a voice? What are our ideas about the voice and our ways of using the voice? 

Voices are tied to bodies. They convey physicality, emotion, and meaning all together.

The Problem with Bodies (Gregory Whitehead):

Voices also tell us about WHO is speaking. As such, voice is strongly linked to both social and individual identities.

How do we cultivate, develop, and discipline our vocal practices? How do these vocal practices produce ideas about our selves and our identities? What audiences are assumed or produced through such vocal practices?

Voice and Language: “[We] live in a world of others’ words.”

Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated –overpopulated– with the intentions of others. Expropriating I, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process… As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other… The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes one’s “own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language… but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions; it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own (Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p.294)

Voices construct identities. They also play them off against one another. Every speaker has available numerous ways of speaking that are associated with different character types, professions, genders, social statuses, moral stances, age groups, ethnicities, and so on.

Voice & Song: “Knowing all the words did not mean knowing a song. The right words had to be saturated with the sweat and specificity of a particular body, a particular life, and a particular voice.” (Aaron Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working Class Culture, p. 315):

https://youtu.be/R9HKxMgekCo

[See also: Maeve Eberhardt & Kara Freeman on Iggy Azalea.]

 

How do technologies that record, represent, and disseminate the voice transform existing vocal practices or bring about new ones?

Alexander Graham Bell’s Voice

Singing in the Rain:

 

Erin Anderson: Her Husband’s Wife’s Pancreas:

“What happens when a body is gone but a voice remains? What do we make of the some-body who still wants to well up from within it?”

The Little Things

I’ve always been told to pay attention to the little things in life and to appreciate the things that you tend to overlook, which is why I made my podcast of the ten daily sounds that give me tranquility and happiness. I started my podcast in the way I like to start my mornings, with the sound of someone running on the treadmill, a shower, and a Keurig machine making coffee. The next sound, of a door opening, is supposed to resemble a person holding open the door for the next. The sound of my little brother’s voice always brings me happiness and is definitely a sound that I enjoy hearing every day. The following four sounds are sounds I experience at the end of the day. Starting with that feeling of relief, my sixth sound is of a pen crossing of homework from my planner. My next three sounds are of popcorn popping, brushing my teeth, and the theme song to Grey’s Anatomy. All three of these sounds are at the end of my day, when it is winding down and I can finally relax. At last, my final sound, which I fall asleep to every night, is the sound of our fan.

In “Making Noise” by Hillel Schwartz, he references how as a society, we believe that silence is what we want, but in reality once it all goes silent, we go crazy. Looking back on our class conversation about how machinery is manufactured to have sound, I noticed how quiet life would be if the objects I recorded functioned in complete silence. I realized that even though all day I cannot wait to go to sleep and get some peace and quiet, yet I always go to sleep with the fan on for the “white noise” effect because like Schwartz said, many of us think we want silence but truly cannot be comfortable without some type of noise.

When talking about the passive ear, Bull and Back state, “we increasingly fail to listen to the natural sounds of the world and that this inattention could have dire consequences.” I found it interesting, that when looking back at my list of sounds, none of them are natural. However, trying to think of, and more importantly, obtain natural sounds for my podcast seemed to pose even more of a challenge. It was very surprising to realize how heavily my daily life and the sounds that I hear and acknowledge revolve around manmade items.

In English’s, “The Sounds Around Us” he explains that the non-cognitive microphone lacks the ability to zone into a particular sound or filter out undesirable sounds. This became apparent when I was recording the sound of my fan, which turned out to be extremely difficult to capture, even when using a high tech recording device. Along with the sound of my fan, almost all the sounds turned out to be more challenging to record than I anticipated.

While making this podcast my eyes were opened to so much about recording devices and the way in which I go through the day hearing different sounds. I recognized how dependent and focused I am on material objects as well as how difficult these sounds can be to capture.

Bibliography:

Bull, Michael, and Les Back. Introduction: Into Sound. n.d.

Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise. n.d.

English, Lawrence. “The sounds around us: an introduction to field recording.” , n.d.