COMM620/Queering the Voice Presentation

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Contents

Queering the Voice, October 29, 2009

Readings

Big questions

  • How does the voice differ from other sound production practices?
  • Do you hear voices differently from other sounds?
  • Do you respond to heard voices differently from other sounds?
  • Is the voice's origin within the body important?
  • Can everyone sing if properly trained and practiced?
  • Is a voice like a signature? Unmistakeably unique?
  • Why and how might a person's voice change over time?
  • How do human voices compare with animal and machine voices?
  • Methodology?

The Grain of the Voice (Barthes)

4054679365_da69d8d052_o.jpg Roland Barthes

Changing the understanding of the "musical object"

Language is inadequate as a system for the description, interpretation of music.

  • "[Music is] translated into the poorest linguistic category: the adjective" (267)
  • "Are we faced with this dilemma: the predicable or the ineffable?" (268)

Grain, a characteristic of the voice in double posture:

  • Not only timbre
  • Friction between music and "something else", language (not message) (273)
  • Embodied in
    • singing voice
    • writing hang
    • performing limb

Music is a field of signifying and not a system of signs

  • Referent is unforgettable, referent is the body
  • Musician is transgression, madness, unbound from meaning
    • Writing can never be so mad as it is "condemned" to meaning (308)
  • Sounds are not signs
  • No sound in itself has meaning
  • Music is a language with syntax, without semiotics

Music demonstrates the meaning of "signifying" w/r/t Texts

Pheno-song

  • Signs
  • All that derives from sung language
  • At the service of communication, representation, expression
  • Language-bound meanings, information
Fischer-Dieskau

Geno-song

  • Material, signifying, embodied
  • Not communicative, expressive
  • Pre-lingual, emotional
  • Functionally alien to communication/representation/expression
  • The "Russian bass" (270)
    • Hearing "directly the singer's body"
    • Not personal, not expressive, not original in voice
Charles Panzéra

Intermezzo

In Schumann's "Kreisleriana":

  • Intoxicated, distracted
  • Disruption, functionally not distraction but displacement
  • Renewal, refresh
  • Interruption - the break
  • Never allowing a discourse to settle, harden

The Beat

  • The Beat aka the accent
  • Corporal
    • "the body must pound, not the pianist" (303)
    • "makes any site of the body flinch ... stretches, distends, extends" (304)
  • Body "enunciates (musically)"
    • It strikes, collects itself, explodes, divides, price, stretches out, weaves, speaks, declaims, doubles its voice, (says nothing)
  • Non-expressive
  • Never the sign of a sign
  • Beats are "executed" by the listener
    • "Ecstatic recurrence" = "origin of the refrain" (303)
    • Disolves distinctions among composer, interpreter, auditor

Tonality

  • Dissonance permits the beat to toll, tilt
  • Modulation (and return): to complete the figure of the beat, give it form
  • Ascent/Descent: necessarily embodied sensation (climbing stairs, approaching orgasm)
    • "by traversing this scale ... beathlessness, haste, desire, anguish, approach of orgasm" (309)
  • Timbre: disappearance of tonality

Open Questions about Barthes

Strange use of familiar words

  • Expressive
  • Soul

Comparisons

  • Intermezzo is the rupture
  • Beat is the return

Signification, Tyranny of

  • Process of making language-bound meaning of signifiers
  • e.g. interpreting lyrics
  • Structure of signs(signifier, signified)
  • Can you better hear grain when you cannot comprehend the language?

Positive censorship of mass culture

  • Dominant in the industry of recorded music at the time of this writing
    • "If you like Schubert and don't like Fischer-Dieskau, Schubert is inaccessible to you." (273)
    • "positive censorship (by repletion) of mass culture" (273)
  • How does this fit today?
    • Widespread access to production, distribution tools
    • Limited radio playlists
    • Closing brick and mortar music stores, especially "classical"
  • Barthes criticizes the lack of emotion, the culture of listening but
    • doesn't account for the practical use value of a recording. to sing along, to color a room, to bring one's own emotional state to bear
    • feature, not a bug?
    • Listener provides the color?

Barthes on Soul/Enjoyment in Fischer-Dieskau

  • Criticizes an emphasis on breath control (soul)
  • Throat, facial mask as signifying instruments (enjoyment)
    • But Lung is embodiment, materiality, rattle, life, death
    • And Throat is constraint, weak point, culturally bound

Voices in Space (Connor)

Embodied voice

Identifying physical attribute

  • Establishes presence
  • "Coordinating" (Merleau-Ponty)
    • Temporal
    • Spacial
    • Oriented
      • Establishes fronting, frontality
  • Monitoring one's expression
  • Auto-simulation, pleasure, affirmation

Not something that i have but something that i do

  • Merleau-Ponty: voice is a way of bringing the speaker's world into being. (4)
  • Issues from me
  • Reflexive, hear myself
  • Self-monitoring
    • Alert to slippages, revealing by accident

Singing along, mimicing, repeating, onomatopoeia

  • Taking the sounds into one's body
  • Possessing them
  • Affirming, sharing in their existence

Disguising the voice

  • Unlike changing hair color, adopting new gait
  • Not merely incidental, about me but my way of being me

Vocalic Space

Voice not only inhabits and occupies space

  • It "actively procures" space for itself
  • The voice is space
  • Voice articulates different conceptions of space
  • Voice enacts different relations among body, community, time, divinity

Frontality (14)

  • Listener is situated amid or in the center of a scene.
  • Ears poorly tuned to directionality in sound
  • Vision requires a distance and division
  • Sound is cooperatively produced (resonance of one's body)

But this arrangement does not confirm the "domination for which the eye has sometimes been held responsible." (16)

Vocalic Bodies

Voice is produced by body

  • Can also itself produce a body

Recorded voices

Voice-confrontation experience:

  • Revealing the voice's split condition
  • One's voice outside of one's bodily production
  • Hearing the voice as unfamiliar
  • Hearing what others hear

Microphones are initially incapable of capturing the dynamic range of a singer trained in an unamplified era:

  • Prefers the "crooning" voice, later characteristic of popular recorded music
  • Full of Barthesian "grain"
    • Sounds of a body: saliva, lips, tongue, breath
  • Conjures a proximal body
    • And invigorates the sense of the listener's own body

Seeing voices

Ventriloquism: making voices appear to issue from elsewhere than their source

  • Power of "unlocated or mobile" voice
  • Presently occupying space alongside magic, illusion
    • Historically shifting among theologist, pathologist, physicist, psychoanalyst/psychologist, sound-technician (14)
  • Distrupts, transcends space as it is seen
  • Indicates power, mystery:
    • Superhuman, subhuman, inhuman

Vaudeville ventriloquism

  • We comprehend that the ventriloquist provides the voice
  • But we are not permitted to "see" the voicing

Open questions about Connor

Cybernetic reading of voicing? (8)

  • Feedback loop

Hearing registers a new sound, eye asks, "From where?"

  • The opposite is not so true (in humans, but perhaps the ordering of senses is different in animals?
  • Dog doesn't "see" until he smells?

TV/Radio ventriloquists (22)

Charliebergen.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Brough

Embodiment in Noise, Metal

Opera queens (Koestenbaum)

"As a young outcast I considered opera embarrassing" (81)

Methodoloy:

  • Diarist, confessional
  • Subjective
  • Artifact

"I have been speaking about gayness as if I knew what it meant. I don't. It is a mirage. I listen for and toward gayness" (153)

The material objects of opera

"I loved the ida of opera before I loved opera: and what I loved, in this idea of opera, was the boxed set." (60)

  • Records, sleeves
  • Programs
  • Magazines, fanzines

Opera in the home

"Cut, disguised, opera can pass into the home, as a genie passes into other realms by compressing his circumference into a bottle." (66)

Diva

"An ordinariness touched by sublimity" (85)

  • Not necessarily a prodigy, nor a virtuoso
  • Yet utterly embodied

Interrelated with their fans:

  • Constructed by fans?
  • Discovered by fans?

Diva prose (and pose)

  • Confident, poised
  • Imitable, learnable
  • Useful, tactical
  • "Camp resistance" (81)

Camp

Sontag: "the anarchic jolt we experience in the face of artistic artifacts that try to be serious and fail." (117)

Connor: "the camp glow"

  • Discovery
  • Having been chosen

Bodily control, revision

Callas "revised" her body (139)

  • Dropped from 210 to 144
  • "Like a sex change, makes us believe in the power of wish"

Callas "disciplined" her voice (141)

  • Weight training, S/M
  • Self-control
  • Self-mastery

Voicing a sexulaity

Mythologies of voice:

  • No one can steal a voice
  • Voices are unique

How is voice like sex: "a cultural myth"?

  • voice system, like sexuality:
    • related but not bound by history
    • punishing, pleasure-giving

Operatic voices:

  • "The Blast"
  • 19th-century sexuality

Throat of a gay man:

  • Problem, and joy
  • Fellatio
  • Throat as door: "coming out" (158)
  • Alternative genetalia (161)

Pleasure:

  • Pleasure to sing, also discipline
  • Sexy to be homosexual, but also confinement (173)

"Every unauthorized sexuality is an X. Hetero can be an X, too, if it tries." (174)

Youtube Diva Fandom

Teenyboppers (Wald)

90s Pop narrative

Deaths of Cobain/2Pac/BIG begat teenybopper:

  • Teenybopper ascendence accompanies Bad Boy / No Limit / bling / ghetto fab

Conventional understanding of youth culture essentially masculine:

  • Troublesome, violent, angsty, rebellious

Resistant, expanded understanding of youth culture:

  • Femme expressions of crisis
  • Agency expressed through pop consumption, fandom, participation

Who is a Teenybopper?

  • Adolescent female fan
  • "Cultural imagination of girls as consumers, citizens, subjects" (4)
  • Aesthetic discrimination of filtered through "racialized concepts of gender and sexuality ... contested in popular culture" (4)
  • Term serves to enable, discipline girls
    • affords visibility
    • constraining their use of that visibility, power
  • Young women defined through their relationship to commodities

Criticism of teenybopper music

Condescencion toward young girls' preferred pop:

  • "gendered heirarchy of "high" and "low" popular culture" (1)
  • Fickle, subject to novelty, fashion
  • Superficiality
  • Aesthetic bankruptcy
  • Conflates performers and artifacts with their consumers, audiences, fans
    • Britney isn't just teenybopper, she is a teenybopper herself
    • 'N Sync aren't just consumed by teenyboppers, they are teenyboppers (and thus feminized)

Lacking authenticity:

  • No authenticating space
  • Embracing artifice, elevation of style
  • Point of origin is within the industry
  • "Pop spectacle", not individual musical expression (5)

Feminist embrace of female performers

"Control" over gender, sexuality (7)

  • revise assumptions about relations between girls' safety and sexual agency
  • play with expression of sexual desire in ways that acknowledge but do not privilege male hetero desire
  • Resistance, liberation is "messy"
    • normative femininity simultaneously displayed, disrupted, recuperated, transgressed (Maglin and Perry, Alfonso and Trigilio)
  • Fan agency not in necessary opposition to commidity culture
    • Popular music culture is where desire is tested out, negotiated, inculcated, disciplined (Hall)
  • Girls may use boy bands in "intensely personal, individually empowering, and occasionally unsanctioned ways." (8)
    • Including recasting suggested hetero relation as homosocial, queer, etc.

Teenybopper music video

Video is the willing submission to the erotic possession of female fans

  • Illusion of proximity
  • Enjoy their "embodied spectacle"
  • Visual pleasure, erotics of observation, voyeurism
  • Consumed in living rooms, bedrooms
  • Centrality of dance
    • Encouraging mimetic relation
    • Fans memorize dance moves
  • Consummable male figures
    • Undermines convention self-possessed, self-control of male presentation (9)

"Girlish" masculinity

  • Used by fans to negotiation their own "fluid gender and sexual desires" (3)
  • Intentionally addressing girl audience
    • Constructs male fandom as homoerotic
    • Serving erotic desires of straight girl fans

Heterosexual anxiety

Hetero male fandom:

  • Can one be a heterosexual male teenybopper?
  • Is appreciation, enjoyment of Backstreet Boys inherently gay? (15)
  • Homo/gynophobia establishes "girlish" masculinity as undesirable
  • Girl fandom is threatening to male desirability
    • In other words, teenyboppers are expressing desire for a masculinity that hetero men have rejected

Female fandom:

  • Homosocial, collective
  • Expressing desire for a feminized masculinity
    • Undermining male-policed hetereosexual desire

Queer fandom:

  • Relevant to a variety of frames, useful for various purposes
    • Drag king inspiration
    • Homosexual desire, in particular "closeted consumption"

Open questions about Wald

Written before Lance Bass came out

  • How did discourse around his coming out support this thesis?

Many examples are grounded in rock. Missing instructive phenomena elsewhere in pop (country, hip hop)?

  • How generalizable is the "good"/"bad" hierarchy of rock critics?
  • How does sellout, under/overground, high/low distinction operate differently in 90s hip-hop?
    • I used to love HER, 1994

Teenyboppers are expressing desire for a masculinity that hetero men have rejected:

  • Did grown up teenyboppers effect the metrosexual moment?

BSB able to shift into a more conventional mode of masculinity without alienating their female fans

  • Blink 182 can simultaneously derive pleasure and reject its masculinity by performing as a boy band
  • Could Britney do the same regarding her femininity?
  • Does the "power" in "girl power" belong to the boys? (19)

Karaoke

Drag

Technology and the voice

Sampled voices

Latin Freestyle

  • Sampling keyboards
  • Judy Torres - "Love Letter"
  • Tina B - "Honey to a Bee"

Cybernetic voices

Sonovox

4054608375_cfbd53c3fc_o.jpg

Talk box

4054616365_14cf457a94.jpg

Vocoder

4055362640_993e100aa5_o.jpg Wendy Carlos

4054621257_30acd2e777.jpg Synton SPX 216

Auto-tune

Barthes: "all [piano playing] is flattened out into perfection: there is nothing left but pheno-text"

4054685605_84be483462.jpg

Hardware

Software

Traditional values, myths disrupted:

  1. Physical feats diminished (Mariah fireworks, virtuosity)
  2. Lowering the bar to entry (same as above?)
  3. Authenticity, unique, character
  4. Not a record of an event but a techno-industrial product

Speech bots

Links

Retrieved from "http://www.kevindriscoll.org/wiki/COMM620/Queering_the_Voice_Presentation"
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