Paravoice

Josh Thorpe

A philosophical and communicational study of representations of self in art and pop

The voice is with us from before birth; it is the essence of our humanity and personality. The sensitivity of the human ear to the human voice is obvious to the composer, dramatist, choreographer, and performance artist; when a human voice is heard, all else is relegated to the background. In electroacoustic music the amount of processing and manipulation required to distort the voice beyond recognition (thereas) is far beyond that of any other sound source. In film we accept severe schizophonia (the de-contextualization of a sound, in this context the substitution of the actual sound produced by a given act with that of an unrelated act) as regards all sound effects, whereas the slightest anomaly of lip-synchronization distracts us to frustration. Witness the synecdochical use of the term 'voice' to mean individual identity, or personality ­ it is the summation of the self. Voice is the essence of the individual and, abstractly, the essence of humanity.

In Western capitalist culture of the late twentieth century, where 'information' is marketed over goods, cyberspace mediates the boardroom (and the bedroom, according to certain acquaintances), where sheep are cloned, where signifier and signified are collapsing into simulacra (Appignanesi and Garratt, 55), where virtual reality is the new environment, what has become of the human voice? Has it become that of a cyborg, a phantasm? How are we to understand the shift taking place from relatively transparent recorded vocal representation to electroacoustic hypermediations of the voice such as dramatic filtering, granulation, linear predictive coding, record scratching, distortion, modulation, pitch-shifting, and brick wall editing (such as gates, instantaneous amplitude changes etc.), as well as heavily transformed paravocality  ­ solo instruments, representing the performer/author, whose signal is unclear or heavily distorted?

If paralanguage is said to constitute the musical aspects of speech (Truax, 33), so too can music be considered extraverbal communication. Certainly, with all due respect to Roland Barthes (and to John Cage for that matter), as an audience we still seldom allow art a life independent of its author, and we seldom listen to sounds as pure sounds rather than signs or metaphors (Coyne, 256) ­ we not only look / listen for meaning, but also expression, communication, and intention: the author's 'voice.'

In this article I will discuss various uses of technology which have different implications for the voice of the character represented and/or the meta-author. First I will discuss Barry Truax's Beauty and the Beast , carrying on briefly to Bartley's Ocean of Ages Revealed , and a short note on my own work. These examples are cases where contemporary technology, the computer, is used to animate speech or song. Using the technique of granulation these composers achieve a pseudo-transparency, or non-primacy of process, while using technology that is actually completely opaque ­ it is, in fact, the compositional centre of the work, where both semantics and vocality itself can be intensified. The resulting mediation operates narratively, not reflexively.

Having explored this treatment of the voice I will briefly look at a few composers whose approach differs from the above, and continue on to popular music, taking what I have learned from my listening to 'art music' to better understand the more intuitive properties found in pop. It is my hope that the intentional, sophisticated techniques found in Beauty and the other works will help to sketch out a model wherein music communicates ­ both cognitively and emotionally (and physiologically). This will give us a framework for looking at popular culture.

Truax's Beauty and the Beast  is an example of deliberate hypermediation of the human voice. There are two strongly defined elements in the piece: first, the narrator and oboe parts, one or both of which introduce and conclude each section, and both of which are represented realistically (that is the mediation which takes place is at a relative minimum); and second, the granulated parts: the voices of Father, Beauty, and Beast, (plus granular virtual-landscape-like sounds abstracted from the voice and oboe). Truax's processing of the voice does not draw our attention so much to its own artifact, rather draws us into a non-linear, fictive diegesis.

The technique of granulation involves the actual deconstruction of a recorded sound. The computer divides it into hundreds or thousands of tiny particles, known as grains. Using a realtime interface, the composer can control pitch, time-stretching and -compression, grain frequency, grain duration, and various other parameters (and changes therein) which alter the texture of the resulting sound. The granulated words range from totally recognizable and intelligible (but slightly grainy) to neurotically dissolute, sometimes becoming timbrally unrecognizable as human voice.

In his liner notes Truax states that his retelling of the Beauty tale is intended to be heard so that the Beast is a part of Beauty, an interior facet of herself that she must confront and resolve. Immediately we think of sexuality; sex is at once grotesque and desirable (genitally and wholly). Also present are overtones of voyeurism, and extreme viscerality of imagery and music. Beast even requests that Beauty return by the next full moon or else he will die: the lunar cycle implies the menstrual cycle in this context of love, death, and coming of age. This archetypal mapping of interior parts of the self is well executed with granulation.

Granulation of the voice creates a kind of phantasmic human. First the voice is time-stretched ­ a function independent from transposition (though not from spectral / psychoacoustic transformation). The distortion of the time domain of speech immediately distorts the perceived sound source, since time and space are intrinsically linked. Certain phonemes, for example, cannot be sustained by the human (stopped consonants for instance) but can be drawn-out with granulation. Pitch changes also alter our understanding of the physicality of the source ­ the size and make-up of the human larynx becomes ambiguous. The very use of grains undermines vocal production, creates a meta-human. The division of the voice into multiple bursts of sound literally disintegrates its perceived source. The grains indeed approach the infinitely small (in terms of psychoacoustics an isolated grain is usually too brief to constitute meaningful sound) and thus becomes ephemeral. This omnipresence is further enhanced by the stochastic binaural switching of the signal in Truax's work, where grains or groups of grains are not panned, they are pseudo-randomly distributed to each loudspeaker. If we think of the infinitely ephemeral as equivalent the ubiquitous (and this tends to be the psychological impression), a super-presence is achieved whereby the voice becomes an internal, non-physical representation of the human. (Internal because, if surrounded by the voice the listener cannot be other than inside its source, and non-physical because the voice has been quantized and disintegrated both temporally and spatially.) What do we equate with the non-physical / internal with regard to the human? The psychological and the spiritual. Truax's hypermediation of the voice transcends the technology itself and invents a new means of interiorizing, psychologizing, and spiritualizing the self.

Because all of Father, Beauty, and Beast are processed similarly, a union is already achieved and the entire narrative becomes the externalization of the inner: an archetypal analogy for the multiplicity of the self (what a perfect 'digital analogue' to grains as multiple components of the whole). The listener immerses him/herself in Dionysian, undefined space as the voices merge with each other and with the sonic diegesis.

Certain more obvious word-painting techniques also point to the multiple-selves model. Beauty's "Why are you hiding from me Beast?", is repeated a number of times, each time truncated, lowered in pitch, and granulated more complexly until we hear the gruesome statement: "Me Beast."

The ephemerality of the grain creates a tension too, a longing in the listener: when a sight is obscured the viewer is compelled to squint harder at it. This obscurity, this tension, relates to notions of pleasure / terror which, although central tenets to the Romantic era, have strong resonances today, and appear to be transcultural and transhistoric: is / was it not sublime to experience Dido's suicide from Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas? "With drooping wings, ye cupids come and scatter roses...roses on her tomb." And is it not sublime to see in The Silence of the Lambs  the image of a dead man, bloody and disfigured in graceful cruciform stance? Is this not terrible pleasure?

Sex is sublime, or rather, that which precedes orgasm is sublime (Thorpe, 7): it is infinite longing, it is desire, it is the id unmasked, it is dissolution, the merging of previously discrete space, matter, physiology, and psychology ­ it is musical. The voice is the self, the visceral and psychological self. In a different context Roland Barthes speaks about the sensuality of vocality:

The grain of the voice...is an erotic mixture of timbre and language....The language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language. (66-67)

How perfect a context then, is vocal granulation as the interior confrontation of the carnal, the beastly. (And what convenient rhetoric it is to insert the above quote on the grain of the voice!) In fact the functioning of music as extra-verbal communication ­ as paralinguistic ­ is an old tradition of word-painting that has its roots in intuition. It is this communicational aspect of electroacoustic music that breathes new life into text in both the extra-semantic cognitive realm and as regards physiological isomorphism (such as changed heart rate, respiration etc.) Truax's transformations of the sound constitute a semiologically significant transformation, as opposed to redundant  effects such as global reverb and equalization etc., which may have static (but not dynamic) meaning, and often result from convention rather than the particular needs of a composition. By dramatically interiorizing and psychologizing the voices of his characters, and by creating for his characters ambiguous physicality, and thereby metaphysical definition, Truax's Beauty and the Beast  is an excellent example of vastly changed representation of the self in electroacoustic music.

Bartley's Ocean of Ages Revealed  makes similar use of granulation. The primary source material for her piece consists of recordings of The Bulgarian Women's Choir. Her work succeeds in its attempt to evoke the historical / spiritual because of its deconstruction and consequent disembodiment of the voice. Again the human, the woman, is referenced, but without the pseudo-localized form of conventional stereophonic placement; the non-physical human is heard as the ghostly, psychologized and spiritualized: that which resides in the Dionysian ether and in human memory.

(My own work with granular and pseudo-granular techniques pursues a similar goal: physical interiority. What does the figurative inside sound like? For me the answer is a combination of psychologized and paraphysiological sounds.)

In all of the above mediations of the voice technology is an opaque presence, an explicit compositional tool - not simply a means of transparent representation used for efficiency or 'fidelity.' However, none of the above is strongly reflexive ­ the pieces are heard meta-narratively, not as studio artifacts. These implementations of granulation leave the voice well enough intact to preserve its organic quality. Whereas (for instance) a gate switching open and closed frequently would create hard, semantically destructive, anti-vocal effects, granulation accentuates, transforms, and extends the figurative and literal voice of the human.

On the opposite end of the continuum, Christopher Koenigsberg's The Rat's Nest  (despite the mimetic title) uses digital artifacts ­ the undesirable byproducts of digital recording ­ to create a piece of music about the artifacts themselves (and the paradox that the most grating of sounds imaginable have their origins in supposedly the purest, highest fidelity medium available).

Cross-over pop / new music composer Eyvind Kang resides in a middle ground between transparency and reflexivity of technology. Angel with wings torn off  from 7 NADEs fuses the mechanical and psychological / sexual in the plodding cycling of machine-like, technological sound and the painful/pleasurable moan of a woman. The sounds are fused with what seems like overarching equalization and by a common amplitude envelope. What results is a bizarre hybrid of human and machine: the voice of some hypothetical cyborg.

In pop culture representations of the self often follow a similar path to Kang. In many ways the pop song relies heavily on convention ­ formal, procedural / technical, and as regards content. Looked at from a different angle, however, pop music is an incredibly rich field which makes use of more complex structures of signification than those pieces I have discussed thus far. The previous examples all come from an academic, 'high' art context, and represent some of the most relevant work being done as regards hypermediations of humanity. Other examples might include the work of Charles Dodge or Paul Lansky. What I would like to get at now is popular, mass-produced /-consumed treatments of the voice and paravoice. How is the self (the figurative voice) represented in current pop culture?

That reminds me of a story.... Recently I paid a visit to my dear friend and fellow composer, to be known herein as D. After chatting casually for two or three minutes he poured me a splash of black sambucco on ice and led me to his computer: "You've gotta check out this sweet new synthesis program I downloaded, man!" Upon activation the computer before my friend began to speak, "Hello D. How are you today?" D. responded, "I'm doing very well, thank you." "Wonderful, enjoy your session D." "Thank you, I will." The sound emitting from Woody (his hard disk) was no FOF simulation, it was a digital recording of D.'s own voice! Then...Windows95 booted up and image of D.'s face appeared in the centre of the screen, surrounded by a mysterious green halo. After we looked at whatever it was my companion had wanted to show me, the screen-saver activated. What did I see? Numerous rendered spinning cubes on each plane of which sat another photo of D. Was this pure narcissism, campy anthropomorphism, or something deeper? Imagine sitting down at your PC (or your television for that matter) to find yourself face-to-face with...yourself, and to be greeted by your own voice! Memories of Charles Ray's Oh! Charlie, Charlie, Charlie... come to mind: an autoerotic orgy of eight sculptural replicas of the artist.

Jean Baudrillard comments on the idea of the double, a concept that has likely been with us since before the beginning of language:

Of all the prostheses that mark the history of the body, the double is doubtless the oldest. But the double is precisely not a prosthesis: it is an imaginary figure, which, just like the soul, the shadow, the mirror image, haunts the subject like his other, which makes it so that the subject is simultaneously itself and never resembles itself again. (95)

If "the strangeness and at the same time the intimacy of the subject to itself" result from the phantasmic quality of the double ­ an immaterial conception of the self (Baudrillard, 95) ­ what is the significance of the manifest electronic representation of the self in cases like the above, where an individual is confronted with a duplication of his / her voice?

As well as being a new iteration of his narcissism, my friend's gimmick is an ironic reaction to what I call 'cyborg marketing' ­ the consumerism constructed around electronic communication and leisure activities. We are slowly accepting extreme and progressively numerous synecdochical/metonymic versions of ourselves: the photograph, the telephone, film, the phonograph, the tape recorder, the radio, the television; and on to virtual reality: karaoke, video games, cybersurfing, logins and pseudonyms, email addresses, PINs.... There is even a corporation (I believe Mondex is its name) that intends to market a single card to be encoded with every bit of personal information that could possibly be of use in the social sphere ­ we are all going to have a number attached to us which defines everything the corporate world needs to know: I will now exist as the summation of my consumptive acts. We cease to be integrated, biological units and begin to be the sum of various referents ­ multiple virtual representations of ourselves which define our social actions. The real ceases to be, a person becomes a multiplicity of simulations (Baudrillard, 159). We have entered a stage of Derridian deferral: the human as signifier, signifying nothing. This is an age of transience, ephemerality, the Dionysian result of Apollonian machine language.

In this hypermediated society it is the celebrity who is most self-simulating. How must the celebrated pop musician conceive of him/herself, knowing that his/her entire persona is electronically mediated? We all have our different personae, indeed living can be thought of as itself performative (Kopelson, 9), but the celebrity is truly close to Derridian and Baudrillardian models of the disintegrated sign. This existence conflicts with the Cartesian self... I login  therefore I am.

Music video simulates performance, but does so in a spatially and temporally non-linear context, a super-paradigmatic order (Appignanesi and Garratt, 63) which constitutes the essence of the postmodern, the poststructural, and provides a model for the music itself. The lip-synch generation spills over into performance. (What is the marketing buzz for U2's "Popmart" tour? "The biggest TV screen in the world!" You go to the 'live' concert to watch television.)

Using a communicational model, we conclude that the music-making of pop musicians is a synthesis of the linguistic and paralinguistic ­ that the lyrics are semantic, and the music metacommunicational. The guitar solo, the drum loop, then, are not abstract musical devices, they are non-semantic referents, they are expression: paravoice . Current pop music is trying to deal with its own hypermediation. By convention the main vocal track itself is rarely anything but 'realistic,' with the exception of occasional distortion and such (U2's Wake Up Dead Man  for instance). Pop deals with the metaphysics of presence in its paravoice.

Portishead is superpostmodern. Only You  (and others) uses the analogue technique of record scratching to communicate a depressed self: a voice, frustrated by external forces, which cannot speak. This is the fetishization of the voice ­ it becomes the morbid representation of obsessive effort and continual failure (and it is pleasurable to experience ­ ah, the recurring sublime). Undenied makes a mechanism out of the paraself. This cybernetic ego is created by a 'low fidelity' percussion track, looped with digital precision, full of noise, and coated with reverb. This part enters suddenly and with a strong attack, as if an impulse. When it exits it does so suddenly also, without any reverb continuing. There is a strong sense of the heterogeneous, of the discrete, in music of this type. Essential to these examples is the impression of multiple space and time. It is as though different tracks are recorded in isolation, with different equipment, in different spaces with different ambiance, and processed differently to achieve a sensation of ultimate juxtaposition. 'Samples' are also used to great effect in this way. The resulting art form is a reflexive accretion of discontinuous, schizophonic relationships and the collapse of spatial and temporal linearity. This non-linear understanding of the self is a symptom of deferral, of multiple electronic simulations of the contemporary human, especially the celebrity. The collapse constitutes a new archetype of postmodern metaphysics: the cyborg.

Techno music represents a less nihilistic sense of self than the trip-hop of Portishead and others. Much techno seems to result from fascination with, rather than alienation by, technology. It too is precise, mechanical... and accelerated. A 'remix' of U2's Discothèque  illustrates the cybernetic paravoice nicely. Much of the insistence, the energy in the piece comes from the sequenced hyperdrum sounds (which alternate binaurally, again creating a sort of ubiquity and uncertain sense of place that seems almost interior). The main vocal track is subtly modified in some way and is accompanied by a super-buzzing square wave much of the time. The square wave is a great analogue metaphor for the digital: its quantized, hard-edged waveform is psychoacoustically very inhuman ­ a perfect accompaniment to the cyborg.

In the 1980s Laurie Anderson foresaw some of the technological obsession we feel now. Anderson played on changing representations of the self in her famous O Superman  which is premised on an obsessive loop of her voice: "ha." The song makes fun of many American archetypes, old and new, including the answering machine, the airplane intercom, and the voice itself. Her own is hypermediated by the Vocoder, an instrument not dissimilar in effect to Lansky's linear predictive coding (but less complex). We hear Anderson's transformed voice modified as if to become the archetypal or collective (yet mediated) voice in a time of massive corporate scheming, ultraconservative world politics, cold war, and the beginning of the electronic explosion (the scraps of which are comprised by our current landscape). She asks for comfort: "Hold me mom, in your electronic arms."

Current popular releases include Duran Duran's Electric Barbarella , the video for which shows a scantily clad robot woman having some kind of breakdown, running amok in a domestic space, chased after by the band members! Sexism aside, this is a nice illustration of contemporary preoccupations with the 'wired' self, and also a metaphor for the near sentience of current technology (if not literally sentient then at least taking on a figurative life as a social being).

Music has always dealt with issues of the self. The works we have looked at are but a few examples of the very different explorations of the self and the voice. We have taken a communicational / philosophical perspective in examining different understandings of the human voice and paravoice. The 'high art' works we have studied tended towards external, archetypal mappings of the interior ­ or, seen from the opposite angle: methods of transforming the physical into the physiological, psychological, and spiritual in order to better understand the self. They also seemed to strive for a non-primacy of technology, yet an opaqueness thereof. The 'pop culture' we studied, on the other hand, tended more toward dealing with the way the external acts upon  the internal ­ a coming to terms with multiple, metonymic versions of the self in contemporary experience. This work is often realistic and transparent as regards the literal voice, but tends to become reflexive in its use of studio artifacts and media reference: paravoice. It may seem to the reader that I have made rather glaring generalizations about pop and art culture, however the distinctions made in this paper are by no means meant to comprehensively define the nature of each world of creation, rather to contrast the extremes at both ends. (It can be fairly stated that the preoccupations of these somewhat distict spheres differ in general as a result of the modes of artistic production surrounding them.) The human voice is the embodiment of the self, what all these examples have in common is the disembodiment of the voice (literally and figuratively), and therefore, the changed representation of the self.

Sources

Texts

Appignanesi, Richard and Chris Garratt. Postmodernism For Beginners . Cambridge: Icon Books, 1995.

Auslander, Philip. Presence and Resistance: Postmodernismand Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text . New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Coyne, Richard. Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor . Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.

Holtzman, Steven R. Digital Mantras: The Languages of Abstract and Virtual Worlds . Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.

Kopelson, Kevin. Beethoven's Kiss: Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery of Desire . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Thorpe, Joshua. Who's(e) Voice?: A Discussion of Franz Schubert's 'Der Erlkönig' . Unpublished paper, 1997.

Truax, Barry. Acoustic Communication . Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1984.

­­­­­, ed. Handbook for Acoustic Ecology . Vancouver: Acoustic Research Centre, 1978.

Weis, Elisabeth and John Belton, eds. Film Sound: Theory and Practice . New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Recordings

Anderson, Laurie. Big Science . Warner Bros. Records Inc., 1982.

Bartley, Wende. Claire-voie . Empreintes Digitales, 1994.

Kang, Eyvind. 7 NADEs . Tzadik, 1996.

Koenigsberg, Christopher K. Brains . PWOA Productions, 1994.

Truax, Barry. Inside: Computer Music and Electroacoustic Music . Cambridge Street Records, 1996.

Lansky, Paul. Fantasies and Tableaux . Composers Recordings Inc., 1994.

Portishead. Portishead . GO! Beat, 1997.

U2. Discothèque  (EP). Island Records Inc., 1997.

U2. Pop . Island Records Inc., 1997.

Visual Art

Ray, Charles. Oh! Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.... Mixed media: 6*15*15', 1992