‘the female voice, by contrast with the male’s, ‘is incapable of sounding natural without a visible body. By virtue of its inherent ‘inadequacy’, it is as if the female voice clamors for cannibalism, for an alien body, for pulpy, heavy mouths just waiting to devour. According to Adorno, the female voice requires a supplemental body.’ – Voice Devoured: Artaud and Borges on Dubbing
This relationship between the female voice and embodiment has been interesting me during the past few months.
I first encountered it in Kaja Silverman’s Acoustic Mirror where she talks about the female voice in cinema from a psychoanalytic perspective. There she compares the female voice to that of the mother, calling on the fantasy of the maternal-voice-as-sonorous-envelope.
Rosolato, for instance, regards the “pleasurable milieu” of the maternal voice as “the first model of auditory pleasure,” whereas Chion associates it with the terror of an “umbilical night.” (p.72)
Looking into female vocal performers, I was quite interested in Diamanda Galas. Her work has always been attractive to me. This is how I came across the paper titled Voice, body and performance in Tori Amos, Björk and Diamanda Galás.
Here Rodriguez uses a term borrowed from the writing of David Schwarz (Schwarz, 1997), introduces the ‘archaic body’ to highlight the connotations of the female voice attached to motherhood and a return to innocence:
‘The archaic body refers back to the earliest voice of the mother […]. Music as the sonorous envelope finds its roots in this first model of auditory pleasure, in a nostalgia (in its original meaning, a ‘return home’) that is reactivated when there is direct correspondence between the music and an ‘archaic oceanic fantasy’.’ (Rodríguez, 2009)
Sources:
Yampolsky, M. and Joseph, L.P. (1993). Voice Devoured: Artaud and Borges on Dubbing. October, 64, p.57. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/778714.
Kaja Silverman and Indiana University Press (1988). The acoustic mirror : the female voice in psychoanalysis and cinema. Bloomington ; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, [], Cop.
Zaplana Rodríguez, E. (2009). Voice, body and performance in Tori Amos, Björk and Diamanda Galás : towards a theory of feminine vocal performance. [online] theses.ncl.ac.uk. Available at: https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10443/1831.
Schwarz, D. (1997). Listening Subjects. Duke University Press.