Some people have a lot of resonance and vibration in their head – the nose, sinuses and bones of the face. This is not a bad thing in itself, for it gives the tone a kind of brilliance, but it is bad if it overbalances the chest notes, because it gets a metallic quality – it is as if the tone had a skin on it, and lack warmth and flexibility. (76)
english has 12 vowels
lalangue
ghosts, unhaunt
I Have Never Read the Bible (Voice Media p 346) https://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/media.php?NumObjet=4145
The trick is no fun if you can see how it is done. https://www.briongysin.com/brion-gysin-art-meaning-explanation/
I I I I
We like to think of the voice as pure action. Instant manifestation of the self. Materiality. Immediacy. Immediate = Formed from the Latin root of ‘immediatus’ = “without anything in between.”
However, speech is mediated by language. Even non-verbal utterings are language specific and have particular inflections. The way we speak is deeply related to our identity, our origins, upbringing and experiences, but also what we choose to identify with and what we choose to deny and eliminate.
(Monolingualism)
We’ll start in the family. Fatherland and Mother tongue. To cite linguist Harald Weinrich ‘the mother tongue is absorbed with mother’s milk’. The sole language the authentic self can exist and be expressed in. Its very name claims singularity. But this singularity means that in the mouth of a non-native speaker, the language remains permanently handicapped, it ‘lacks childhood’.
This leads to countless migrant and displaced people who end up stuck in between. Half there half not. Half this and half that.
Belonging everywhere and nowhere.
That’s one way to look at it. They call this the monolingual perspective.
But there’s another way.
Irish writer Samuel Beckett did not change languages because he had changed places but, rather, he changed places in order to be able to change languages. In France and in French, Beckett is not expected to belong completely. This is why he is more “at home” there—that is, nowhere.
This topic is what preoccupies bilingual Japanese writer Yoko Tawada. Second language as a detachment and disruption in the relationship between the signifier and the signified. Her observations revolve around how learning a second language actually changes one’s relationship to the mother tongue. Questioning its structures that are otherwise taken as a given. This leads to reconsideration of how meaning is created through language and a distancing from both first and second language. In this detachment one is allowed a step closer to the materiality of things. She attacks the concept of the singularity of the mother language by comparing it to a typewriting machine:
Instead of uniqueness, the machine-body offers endless repetition and mechanical reproducibility of language.
Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan describes this distance language creates thus:
‘I identify myself through language, but only by losing myself in it, like an object.’
Challenging the limits of language and the immediacy of the voice have inspired many sound poets and artists. It was at the core of the Lettrism and Ultra-Lettrism movements, of the mid 20th century which came as a reaction to the increased presence of technology in everyday life, which raised questions of identity and presence.
The issue of identity is particularly poignant in Henri Chopin’s work, where he uses the technology of tape recording to multiply himself on stage, turning the body into ‘a factory of all sounds’ [LaBelle] He often ended up acting as a ventriloquist on stage acting out the sound of his own voice played through the tape machine.
Brandon LaBelle summarizes this movement as follows:
‘Though ‘transmission-message-reception’ sought clear channels, the phonetic, and sonic agitations of artists and the poets at this time were filling such channels with spit, silence, cracked electronics, and broken music.’ [1]
With the introduction of the internet with its lingua franca, English, and the omnipresence of the digital voice, questions on the importance of language and its role in creating meaning have only persisted.
Rully Shabara is an Indonesian artist whose practice revolves around the human voice and language, its powers and nuances, contextualized within the increased presence of the digital voice and its desire to replicate humans.
He developed a language that is based on what he considers ideal.
‘it turns out there is this alphabet, primitive, whose meaning we were yet to decipher. My friends and I, none of us knew what it was at first. Even though we were the ones who created it.’
‘How is it that language turns out to be so fundamental in shaping the logic behind thinking? The way we communicate, interact, and then form clans, societies, and eventually a complex civilization.’
Another approach towards exploring the materiality of speech is through the sound potential of the language itself. In Language As Sound, Tania Candiani uses Polish sounds and rhythms absent from the artist’s mother tongue, Spanish.
It is again interesting to see how a more distant ear can pick up particularities of a language in a way a native speaker wouldn’t.
With the pluralization of the digital voice, we may be wanting to rethink our position to language, mother language and monolingualism and identity. The lack in the foreign speaker might be the result of an overattachment and romanticization of the mother tongue we became accustomed to.
Update: Recorded some takes of this. Too much? Tiring. Dull. Hard to follow.
I’m speaking of voice. How can I use the voice? Should it be my voice?