by Zach Cohen and Hayley Manges
Is there more to the voice than the words we say? This was the theme of our discussion on voices, which we wanted to dissect for its nonsemantic meaning. We began by summarizing one of this week’s readings—an essay written by contemporary Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero—which explores, and perhaps answers, just this question.
In her essay, “Multiple Voices,” Cavarero begins by breaking down postmodernist writer Italo Calvino’s “A King Listens.” This is a story of a king who is acoustically attuned to the inherent timbres of the voice, and seeks to find meaning within them—a challenge in the political sphere. One night, when he hears the voice of a woman sing from beyond the walls of his palace, he finally hears meaning within the voice, and this meaning is uniqueness and a “self-revelation of the existence” (reminiscent of Derrida’s idea that we develop our notion of self through our voice). The king then tries to sing with her, but finds he cannot sing, as true singing would have communicated his uniqueness that “infects the other” and creates a reciprocal manifestation. Trying repeatedly to in a duet with the woman’s voice, the king finally sings, recognizing the truth of his humanity. Upon learning this, it is implied, he finds that being king means nothing.
Cavarero summarizes her main points to be this: that voices are unique—that they exist to be relational and communicate uniqueness, relationality, difference in gender, and age. Her essay, however, also asserts that the uniqueness of voices has gained little attention in study of the voice. Philosophy, she argues, not only ignores the voice, but also renders it insignificant as philosophical tradition ignores uniqueness in general. It fails, she says, to recognize the plural reciprocal communication of voices, and does not recognize meaning in the vocality of the speakers. Next, Cavarero mentions Paul Zumthor’s revolutionary inquiry into the voice as separate from speech in his distinction between orality and vocality, the former characterizing the “bearer of language,” and the latter being the vocal properties that belong to the voice independent of language. He gives us this notion that when we take away the directionality of speech, we are left with a voice that has its own meaning. She then proposes that we need to take on Roland Barthe’s perspective to understand speech through grain rather than language. Unlike Barth, however, she does not support a vocality that consists of power relating to speech. Instead, Cavarero concludes that it is not enough to be attuned to the sonority, bodily pleasure, “song of the flesh,” and rhythmic drives of the voice—we must escape the linguistic’s ignorance of relationality, and make primacy of the voice, separated from speech, an end for relationality in and of itself.
After providing this summary of Cavarero’s essay, we discussed as a class how her ideas relate to those of Barthes, and how we may apply her main ideas of vocality to our lives. We asked if voice, without linguistics, carries meaning in and of itself and if messages, separated from the voice of their producer, always carry the same meaning. Our aim in these questions was to point at things such as a text message or reading something with a disembodied voice. Is there a miscommunication? Is the intentional vibe lost? Does the speech and inflections of a voice convey something that gives context to the meaning of a message that is then lost upon its transformation into symbols? The group consensus on this was an agreement that understanding the true meaning of a written message is sometimes difficult because, in speech, vocal inflections, speed, emphasis, and pitch assist the listener in decoding a message. We miss these auditory cues when reading the spoken message.
This brought up questions relating to Dolare and vocal inflection: If linguistics is binary, what are the binary factors between a voice and the face it’s attached to? What is the role of technology in this exchange? This prompted other questions addressing the role technique plays in grain, if in fact, it plays a role at all—can technique and/or filters create an uncanniness that hides one’s grain? With modern technology, Yes. Vocoders, for example, hide grain fairly well. Grain can also, in a sense, be appropriated. People do Billie Holiday impressions and sound like Billie Holiday—you don’t see them, but you hear “their” voice and think of them. This is perhaps evidence that technique can shape a voice as much as its grain. As a group, we also speculated that perhaps the reason why many artists within pop music sound similar these days lies within the technology many similarly use, such as autotune, which seems to have an effect of multiple people sounding like the same artist. We hypothesized that with the advance of technology, we may eventually be able to apply a vocal filter of a certain artist to mimic their sound.
After this discussion, we played a game, based on the hit television show, The Masked Singer, where everyone was asked to listen to three different artists’ covers of The Beatles’ “Yesterday” and determine, through their unique vocal styles, if they could identify at least one of the artists they were listening to. This forced those participating to draw inferences about who they were hearing, that connect the voice to the person without seeing their face. This brought up the question: Do our bodies as listeners play a part in the equation in recognizing voices? Culture and relativity was brought up as well in terms of how each listener’s past experience plays a role in their interpretation of sounds. The consensus in this conversation was yes—how we hear, interpret, and connect information is relative to the sounds that we have been exposed to throughout our lives. Part of our lack of understanding and guesswork in the activity can also indicate that modern singers, the ones in the activity, did a poor job portraying grain.
Billie Holiday’s vocality is expressive of racial injustices, which align with how Cavarero defines vocality as an expression of the body which includes gender and race. The nexus between Barthes and Cavarero is the human body as a grounding for audio and social interaction (singing and listing).
The main takeaway from the discussion and Caverero was that we as listeners should read closer into geno-text, as it relates to speaking and singing voices, to gain more information about what someone is saying to us and become better listeners. Not only should we take semantics into account, but also what the body is saying. If, according to Marshall McLuhan, the “medium is the message,” then the body, the medium of our voice, will always be a part of our message.
Based on the Intro to Sound Studies class discussion on voices which occurred on September 17, 2020.