Voice and the Apparatus of Recording Technology

In light of today's discussion, I was interested by the notion of recording technology and its ability to effect changes in the voice. When Reese mentioned how he hated hearing his own voice in recordings, I understood it as a common anxiety. Somehow, there must be a discrepancy between how people think they should sound and how they actually sound when the voice is disembodied and reflected back to them through an apparatus. What then is the "proper" voice?

Frances Dyson, a feminist media theorist, describes the emergence of the "proper" radio voice in her essay, "The Genealogy of the Radio Voice":

It does not mumble or stutter, it pronounces full and meaningful sentences, it says something. As a voice, it is traditionally male, having a certain timbre and intonation that suggests a belief in what it is saying and a degree of authority in saying it. Critics of the dominant radio voice have dubbed it "the voice of authority". Yet, although this voice appeared with the advent of radio and seems therefore to have sprung from the 20th century, it in fact has been a long time in formation and has accumulated a host of characteristics that connect it to the deepest symbolic and epistemological structures governing thought, speech, and media in western culture. The origins of contemporary production and reception of the voice can be traced to the remote past of western culture, where the guidelines for "proper speech" -- speech which is authoritative, meaningful, gendered as masculine and representative of a particular worldview -- were first set in stone.

Of course, when Barthes speaks of the grain of the voice, he refers specifically to the singing voice. However, in today's media-rich environment, it would be difficult to ignore the effects that media has in the production of our own voices and the anxieties it creates around how we perceive our voices and how we wish to be perceived. In early western thought, the mind became the supreme achievement of human existence, while the body, ever conceived as a machine, presented a problematic knowledge, thus becoming subordinate. In order to properly articulate the mind, the voice had to become disembodied, or de-corporealized, if it was to express a higher knowledge and ascend towards God.

For Plato the naming voice is an "instrument of cosmic synthesis"; for Aristotle the breath required for vocal production is interpreted by Aquinas as an "instrument" of the soul. Such definitions are important in determining the true voice as a voice of the mind, instrumental in the achievement of a higher good, distanced from the alarming presence of the body. Even the breath, the most spiritual aspect of all human corporeality, is eradicated in this system.

Dyson goes on to describe the proper voice of radio as markedly gendered and how women have had to adapt their voices in order to assimilate into a male-dominated system:

It is not difficult to locate the voices excluded from radio. Look to any race, gender or cultural group which poses a threat and listen to their voices on radio. The most consistently excluded or derided voice is feminine. Not only has radio’s mode of direct address developed from oratory, a traditionally masculine pursuit, but radio’s fundamental technology, the microphone, was originally designed for the male vocal range. In fact the radio voice, characterized as masculine, has become so idealized in contemporary culture that feminine voices of authority like Mrs. Thatcher, have had to train their voice to speak in a lower pitch and develop microphone technique in order to be accepted as authoritative by the listening public. Higher pitch is associated with nervousness and a lack of confidence, suggesting that the speaker neither believes in themself nor what they are saying. A rising pitch often produces a shrill voice, and is associated with hysteria and irrationality. These characteristics, among many others, are designated feminine in western culture, and heard as signs of women’s essential lack—both of presence and truth. On radio they are particularly relevant, since it is a medium in which the subject is represented by the voice alone. Thus to be listened to or even heard on radio, women have to adopt the persona (from the Greek, meaning through sound) of the ideal male voice.

So, we see that the history of radio favors what Barthes would perhaps call the "pheno-voice". While the grain of the voice is the site of difference, the voice of authority severs its connection to the body and imposes a single streamlined voice. The apparatus of recording technology also plays an important role in contextualizing a voice in this dominant social sphere. What we hear on the radio may influence how we believe our own voices compare to this standard. The question is, do we affect a change in our voices in order to be well received by a listening audience? To what degree do we subconsciously subscribe to the same standards of proper voice when we know we are being recorded?

A Grain of Voice Like Sandpaper

The naked voice is so simply, the one without clothes. It is the voice without the guise of fashion, its tricks of colorful distraction, of pleasurable enhancement, or the manufactured aesthetic. The voice without the shelter of layers, the protective extensions to keep the world from touching our tenderness. The voice without the false articles, the shameful obfuscation of our original beauty…the naked voice is the essence of the body, as the body alone, unhindered, unrepresented, and uncovered, standing before us in truthful nudity – nothing more, nothing less.

Dangers writes all of their songs with this naked voice, bearing their marred bodies as raging poetry. They destroy any chance of articulation, instead invoking rabid, driven pronunciation of the body in its “mother tongue,” which for Dangers is pure anger (Anger ain’t a mood/it’s a goddamn way of life). The grain of voice is all in the delivery, and Dangers seems to punching us. If nothing else, one can appreciate the force of their bluntness, the encroaching explicitness that is too personally revealing and emotionally draining to be anything but honest. Anything as honest as this is art to me.

In the interest of avoiding an “adjectival” description of the music, here is my alternative interpretation “Break Beat”:

This song is muscle tearing over boiling water; scratchy hemoptysis; broken nose Barry Manilow…scraped knuckles, raised fist.

"Naked Voice" Ramblings

Karen in the previous post brought up a question I had as well while re-reading Barthes: can one transition between pronunciation and articulation? Can both exist, albeit in tension, within the same song? the same artist?

This semester, I am also taking a class in the English department entitled Poetry and Music. Currently we are reading dub -poetry and those inspired by the Creole-based sound literature: the likes of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Kamau Brathwaite. Although dub poetry is known as a poetry of thematics, usually dealing primarily with themes of immigration, racism, injustice and oppression, for me it is the space in which the friction between music and language has most clearly existed. A classmate commented that the poem was "difficult to close-read," that perhaps we were not supposed to close read because by doing so, it would make it into an aesthetic object trivializing the revolutionary impulse of the poem. I wanted to respond: "Pish-posh, read Barthes." (Which we will later in the week). Dub-poetry was made to be listened to, if not read aloud, then to cultivate music in the mind's ear. It is a close reading that happens aurally, not with the eyes. Perhaps its my own unfamiliarity with the Creole-language which diminishes the preeminence of semantics, but I find myself drawn to the diction of the read/sung poem: dub poetry is about rhythm, about enacting language, making one's voice move and transfigure syllables and phonemes.

For my long essay in class, I plan on writing about one of my favorite poems by Brathwaite entitled "Stone." The poem, although not traditional dub-poetry borrows from that tradition. Brathwaite is known for theorizing upon the Creole-language and using a technique called the transplosion of words, which is about colonized cultures reappropriating, reinfiltrating the dominant culture through language. To transplode words is to address the dislocation, the displacement, the exile experienced by not just human bodies, but human language and then creating news words to reflect particular experience.

The reason I am drawn to the poem "Stone" is because it is an emotionally and physically exhausting poem to read aloud (and I must read it aloud). Not only has Brathwaite created new words in a semantic sense, but he dislocates, disjoints words in this poem - using periods to break open words, so you don't know where to begin, where to end, where to take a breath, where to place sounds upon the tongue or in the throat. Like dub poetry, this poem rings in my ears long after I, my professor, or Brathwaite has finished reading it. Like dub poetry, this poem affects my language, my speech, my music long afterwards. I carry it with me. I yearn for it.

It is a punctum.

I tend to read poetry aloud because I like the feel of consonants and vowels on my tongue. Each time I have read "Stone" (A link to a not so great copy of the poem. I also have a mp3 of Brathwaite reading it that I wish I could share). I have tried to do something different: pronounce words differently, inflect here, soften there, pause and pause, race breathless, constrain and flatten the throat, the tongue, the chest, my fists. The more familiar with the poem I have become though the more it seems like a battle between articulation and pronunciation - the emotional meaning of the poem, a concentration on the breath, has seeped into my reading, sometimes, I fear, renouncing attention to diction, to my "tongue, [my] teeth, [my] glottis, [my] sinuses, [my] nose" (The Grain of the Voice, 271) therefore losing the grain.

Further thoughts on Barthes

According to Barthes on page 280, there is no neutral voice. The neutral voice, if found, produces “a frozen world, one in which desire is dead” (280). In essence, the voice that is used in day to day or for musical purposes is loaded with eroticism. Barthes thus situates an implicit desire in life that is actualized through the voice. In order to access this desire, Barthes shows one venue, that being the voice. Basically, by avoiding articulation, the clear phonic intensity to consonants that ultimate result in a voice with “parasitical clarity,”or meaning, one favors a “lover’s discourse” otherwise known as the grain of the voice. It is the expression of desire or pleasure that a voice with grain can successfully communicate. In looking at the video posted from seconds 50 and on the singer demonstrates the magic of auto tune. What one sees is how auto-tune alters one’s natural voice, making his voice stay in the right key and pitch. I am left wondering whether this element in particular, autotune, can distort the voice enough to produce the frozen world lacking in desire. My thoughts are still a bit hazy regarding these issues, but the autotuned version does not appear to be the “lover’s discourse” type of music Barthes favors.
Other questions that I have had while re-reading the text: While distinguishing between the two types of voices, Barthes does not make it clear whether a person can transition between them. That is, can the grain of the voice develop in an artist or person through training against articulation? Or if once present in a voice, is it possible to lose the act of pronunciation for one of articulation?

Cocteau Twins - A Language Encounters a Voice

"The geno-song is the volume of the speaking and singing voice, the space in which the significations germinate "from within the language and its materiality"; this is a signifying function alien to communication, to representation (of feelings), to expression; it is the culmination (or depth) of production where melody actually works on language--not what it says but the voluptuous pleasure of its signifier-sounds, of its letters: explores how language works and identifies itself with that labor." (Barthes, The Grain 271)

Fischer-Dieskau Barthes Grain of the Voice

Barthes on Panzera The Grain of the Voice and Music Voice Language

Nirvana Smells like Teen Spirit

See Anatasia's Comments on Eminem. Think also about Barthes' theory of active and passive listening as well as the viability or applicability of reading music as pronunciation or articulation.

Dark Lady of the Sonnets, a poem about Holiday by Amiri Baraka from _Black Music_

Dark Lady of the Sonnets
Nothing was more perfect than
what she was. Nor more willing to fail.
(If we call failure something light can
realize. Once you have seen it, or felt
whatever thing she conjured growing
in your flesh.)
At the point where what she did
left singing, you were on your own. At
the point where what she was was in
her voice, you listen and make your
own promises.
More than I have felt to say, she
says always. More than she has ever
felt is what we mean by fantasy.
Emotion, is wherever you are. She
stayed in the street.
The myth of blues is dragged from
people. Though some others make cat-
egories no one understands. A man
told me Billie Holiday wasn't singing
the blues, and he knew. O.K., but what
I ask myself is what had she seen to
shape her singing so? What in her life,
proposed such tragedy, such final
hopeless agony? Or flip the coin and
she is singing, "Miss Brown to You."
And none of your cats would dare
cross her. One eye closed, and her
arms held in such balance, as if all
women were so aloof. Or could laugh
so.
And even in the laughter, some-
thing other than brightness, completed
the sound. A voice that grew from
singer's instrument to a woman's. And
from that (those last records critics say
are weak) to a black landscape of need,
and perhaps, suffocated desire.
Sometimes you are afraid to listen
to this lady.
(Black Music 25)

The Grain of the Voice

Barthes makes a distinction between the voice that has "grain" and the voice that doesn't. In what terms can we think of a song that is a duo of the two?

An example of such a song is "Stan" as sung by Eminem and Dido. In The Grain of Voice Barthes says that Fischer-Dieskau's voice doesn't have a grain, but Panzera's does:"Fischer-Dieskau's art, expressive, dramatic, emotionally clear, conveyed by a voice without "grain", without signifying weight, corresponds perfectly to the requirements of an average culture; this culture, defined by the extension of listening and the disappearance of practice, is eager for art, for music, provided that such music be clear, that they "translate" an emotion and represent a signified (the poem's "meaning")..." Then on p. 272 he says that Panzera, on the other hand, does not articulate, or separate the consonants, and that we do not hear him "breathe" but only "shape the phrase". In "Stan", Eminem's voice is like that of Fischer-Dieskau because you can hear the emotion of anger in his voice, so the meaning of the lyrics is clear from the way he sings them, and Dido's voice is like that of Panzera because it seems as though the lines she is singing are not as articulated and do not really express any emotion, instead, she "skates over" the words as Panzera does.
Since we find examples of both in one song, we can't talk about it only in terms of one, so the definition of having a grain becomes more flexible. And it is the song’s structure of combining different styles and voices of Eminem and Dido that allow the song to create this muddling. Additionally, it also has elements of both the pheno-song and geno-song because while we could think of Eminem's voice as being "dramatic" and "expressive" (p.270), and thus, having the elements of the "pheno-song", it also has the elements of the "geno-song" because diction and volume are important for him.

Music, Voice, and Body

Music, Voice, and Body Questions

In preparation for tomorrow, Group 1 has prepared the following questions for class discussion. These are inquiries that we will likely use to illuminate both Barthes and Zeffirelli’s Callas Forever (2002):

The Beatles’ “Twist and Shout”:
Is one’s voice that voices itself through a particular body always the same?
Can there ever be an “authentic voice”?
Is Bathes’ understanding of the body that “figures” the “grain of the voice” invariable?

Los Cojolites’ “El Conejo”
What does the naked voice sound like? What does a clothed or disguised voice sound like?
Is the naked voice the most honest voice, singing the story “without disguise”?
Is the "grain of the voice" in this song signifying something more than merely anticipating a rabbit?

The Gregory Brothers’ “Bed Intruder Song”
Is this a song completely devoid of the “grain of the voice”? Has the “grain” been skinned alive?
If Fischer-Dieskau’s voice is Apollonian, can Antoine Dodson’s voice crushed through The Gregory Brother’s auto-tune machine be understood as the Socratic voice?

Billie Holiday and the Grain of Voice

I was not sure if we were going to bring back Billie Holiday, so I will go ahead and share a personal story which may, in a way, illustrate Barthes' grain of voice.

The first time I heard "Strange Fruit" was in the 2nd grade. I was playing Monopoly with my parents in the living room and the radio was tuned to a jazz station which was mostly playing big band music. This song, sung by Billie Holiday, came on after and I had such a strong reaction which I now understand differently through the reading on Barthes. Being 6 or 7, I did not understand the metaphor of lynching, let alone really take any meaning from the lyrics. At that age, lyrics did not communicate to me, they were just the tool which allowed me to participate in the singing-along to a song. But I knew that there was something about this song, and something specifically about Holiday's singing, which made me uneasy. I did not know if the song was particularly sad or happy, but I knew that there was something in her voice, not entirely in the words, not entirely in the melody, it was precisely the point in which music entered the language. This friction, which is the grain (and is there not a more 'grainy' voice than Holiday's?) which I embodied and experienced as something coming from an ugly place. I responded in the only way I could, being confused and uncomfortable, I cried. With my parents prompting me to explain myself, all I knew how to say to convey my feelings was "I don't like this song." Not because I thought it was a bad song, but because the effect the voice had on me and the way I felt was not a knowledge, but an experience of embodiment, the very body which is the source of such a disgust and disparity. My body felt as if it housed a cancer, pulsing then spreading with each annunciation, a sensation which I could only find unpleasant at the time. Also, I was uncomfortable because I had never experienced any sort of aesthetics so strongly, having only before been mesmerized by the television screen. My parents thinking my response was an excuse for being a sore-loser, ended the game deciding I was too sensitive to play Monopoly.

Although I think most of us would agree that this song is beautiful, brilliant, sad, whatever adjective you like... I think the only way I can accurately describe this song is that it is difficult to listen to.

Space in the Construction of Music

Normally with music videos, it is the video which is parasitic on the music. It requires the music to justify its existence and to serve the purposes of entertainment. With Fionn Regan's "Be Good or Be Gone," that relationship appears slightly inverted—the music needs the video to operate. This song would not be good on the radio, on your iPod, etc. this is not simply aural listening, this is a listening which, much like a face to face interaction engages the third kind of listening Barthes speaks about in that it is not, “what is said or emitted, but who speaks, who emits” and in this case where it is spoken because, “such listening is supposed to develop in an inter-subjective space” (p. 246) where, “I am listening” would also mean “listen to me” but this time the inter-subjective space begs, ‘listen to me here’.

The music video illustrates how the appropriation of space is also a matter of sound. "Be Good or Be Gone" goes beyond the domestic space as Barthes speaks of “territory”; instead it illustrates different ways territory is marked by sounds. The compilation of these “spaces” isn’t a “household symphony” but instead a symphony of our constructed Earth as sound signifies differently in each location.

This song prompts us to ask, what is the role of space in the construction of the music we listen to today?

Barthes writes in Musica Practica that there are really two forms of music, “one you listen to” and “one you play” (p.261). They are variously labeled music proper and musica practica. Forms of music which are examples of passive listening (music proper) are the concert, the festival, the record, and the radio. Most forms of music today appear to be examples of passive listening. We still have the radio, the concert, and the festival. Now instead of the record player we have iPods, and sites like YouTube and Pandora.

Barthes asserts that, “playing no longer exists; musical activity is no longer manual, muscular, kneading” (p.262) and then asks, “What is the use of composing if it merely confines the product in the enclosure of the concert or the solitude of radio reception?” We could similarly ask, what is the use of making, playing, pounding out new music if it merely confines the ‘song’ to a cage in our hands, the box (computer, radio, television, iPod) at our fingertips? Is this why playing no longer exists? Does it no longer exist?