Our introduction to Voice, Noise, Sound, and Sense centered around a topic that has been recurring during this course: what is voice? Being my first insight to the topic of sound studies, it stuck with me and was something I always connected our new topics back to. Before this class voice wasn’t something I had really thought about. I knew on the most basic level that voice is what we hear when people speak. I’d heard of the mystical side where voice represents our soul and is a thing that separates us of from animals—something I now know comes from Aristotle. Still it wasn’t a thing I’d taken the time to consider. Then in this class we read multiple examples of people with well thought out opinions about what voice is. Barthes said, “The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings”. Aristotle called voice “a sound with meaning”, although he later spoke in great depths about the soul. We also looked at projects and writings that challenged these opinions. My first writing project for this class centered around reconciling different peoples work and ideas about soul. Since then I have thought even more about voice for the purposes of this class. For a while I thought that people were thinking too deeply, and voice is just the sound that we make when we are communicating. I entertained the idea that voice was an outward expression of our inner souls. My final judgement falls somewhere in the middle. Now at the end of the course I believe that voice is an expression of our inner selves meant for communication in any capacity whether it be with others or ourselves—although voice isnot necessarily representative of soul.
On the first day of class we watched a video of Alvin Lucier’s sound experiment, “I am Sitting in a Room”. The experiment features a recording of his voice being repeatedly fed into speakers as the feedback distorts what he is saying a little more each time. This continues for forty-five minutes, with the phrases losing intelligibility at the eleven-minute mark. The project is interesting because it disrupted Aristotle’s and other’s long-held notions about soul in sound. If the sound degenerated into something completely non-sensical and non-human, did it still contain its original soul? However, my initial response to Lucier’s project was colored by my unfamiliarity.
“I found myself wondering why Lucier chose to go on for so long. The difference between the sound made 30 minutes in and 44 minutes in wasn’t that large. He said he “smoothed out” his words and showed the resonant frequencies of the room, but I’m not sure I really understand the purpose of the exercise” (Gilleland, Jan 14th response).
All in all, I seemed unimpressed. However, this disbelief was just my first reaction and my first writing project was more carefully considered. In my first essay I switched from thinking that this was all being made into more than it needed to be and leaned in to the idea of soul in voice. I used the writings of Adriana Cavarero to reconcile the difference between Lucier and Aristotle, Barthes, and others who believed that soul was innate in human voice. I argued that Cavarero’s term “inner uniqueness” was the same as Barthes “grain”, which I’ll go into deeper detail about later. I said that “the “inner uniqueness” [in voice] that conveys that soul doesn’t necessarily come through in all speech” (Gilleland, Writing project #1). So, I believed that soul is in speech, but it only comes through when we are being honest. My quote that “soul doesn’t have to exist in everything humans say— even though they do have souls” is evidence that I did believe soul can exist in voice, but with the caveat that voice still exists without soul in many cases. So, although I consider what voice can be, in this project I never define what voice is. That’s because that is a very hard thing to do. I needed to educate myself more beyond the work of Lucier, Aristotle, Barthes, and Cavarero.
Barthes was the first informative text I read about voice. He tried to communicate his meaning through music. He says that human voice is special because it has a “grain”. This grain is “the very precise space of the encounter between a language and a voice” (Barthes, 505). In my writing project I liken grain to “inner uniqueness” or “soul”. Barthes tries to convey in writing “the impossible account of an individual thrill” (Barthes, 505) he experiences listening to music. It is the grain in a particular artist’s harpsichord playing that he can hear intuitively and makes her music better than anything computer generated. This first text gave me the vocabulary to begin to discuss voice, but I find my final opinions align more closely with one of our last authors, Mladen Dolar. Dolar’s writings view the voice as a “vehicle” (Dolar, 541) for meaning. Dolar asserts that “the voice is the impeding element that we have to be rid of in order to initiate a new science of language” (Dolar, 542). The examples he used that made his meaning clear to me were how accent and intonation and characteristics that make us “aware of the voice” (544). Particularly accent can serve as an “obstacle” to gaining the meaning behind a voice. Think about how a thick accent can make it difficult to understand someone. This instance serves as a clear example of how the voice is a vehicle that we must deconstruct and look past to obtain meaning. Even if the meaning is difficult or impossible to obtain, the voice is still there. Dolar’s logic classifies anything expressed that attempts to convey meaning as voice. A third author that we read whose work circled around voice was Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that subliminal kid. In his book, Rhythm Science, Miller talks about remixing and how technology blurs the lines of what voice is at all. A very provoking line in the book is “the voice you speak with may not be your own.” In the digital age, it’s easy to take other people’s words and repurpose them for yourself. They then become yours, even if you didn’t say them, using them makes them your voice. This supports Dolar’s conclusion that anything with a message is voice, regardless of if the message is received or if it comes from one person’s physical body.
Truthfully, as Dolar also notes, the vocabulary to describe voice is inadequate. This whole exercise is a futile attempt to put in words something very internal. In our class we read so many different opinions on voice and we were inconclusive about which is correct. However, I can speak for myself and my final opinion. I think that if we are tolook at voice in a scientific way the idea of soul should be discarded. The word is too hokey for many to take seriously and ultimately cannot be proven. My final judgement is that voice is any form of communication that has meaning, regardless of whether its intelligible or original. This means that voice can be in speech, writing, music playlists, animal calls—literally anything meant to communicate. Thinking about voice is important because its closely tied to our definition of humanity. I’m not suggesting that animals are human, but I am suggested that they be treated as humanely as possible. Our conclusions about voice affect the way we treat all beings. Our conclusions about sound affect the way we build our societies. To keep evolving we should keep thinking about sound, voice, and how they affect us every day.
Works Cited:
Barthes, Roland. 1977. The Grain of Voice. In Image-Music-Text. Translated by S. Heath. London: Fontana Press. Pp. 179-89
Dolar, Mladen. 2006. The Linguistics of Voice. In A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pp. 13-32
Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Paul D. Rhythm Science. MIT Press, 2004.
