WRI-101: Voice, Noise, Sound, Sense.

“The Grain of Voice” by Roland Barthes touches on the idea that voice in itself is meant to take on a symbolic figure rather than being interpreted for its literal property. In other words, as Barthes describes it, “Above all, [the] voice bears along directly the symbolic, over the intelligible…” This concept relates perfectly to Lucier’s performance in that the content of the words being spoken were in many ways irrelevant to the phonic experience being conveyed. As the track continues to loop, Lucier’s words become incomprehensible and all we are left with is a meshed composition of noises. This suggests that the actual verbiage in the performance was unimportant, or at the very least secondary to the noises that comprised the words. Further, and in the context of Barthes theory, Lucier would be more concerned with how his audience construes the sounds that come from performance over their understanding of the the tangible words. Ultimately, as I believe Barthes would argue, the noises being transmitted at the tail-end of Lucier’s performance are essentially the intended message being condensed into its purest symbolic form.

When listening to Lucier’s piece several times, initially the setting of the piece is quite bland and ominous. Reviewing the works of several other prominent figures possessing influential opinions on the depths of language has introduced my mind to the different levels of interpretations. Barthes’s work speaks to the idea that words found within the bounds of musical content no longer can be truly expressed due to the subjectivity of the audience. Throughout Lucier’s piece he allows for many interpretations of language in it’s purest form. Lucier signifies the importance of language, and defines how the depths of the sounds are attached to words arising from the soul. Aristotle and Plato both possess similar beliefs when speaking in the context of how the use of the voice is a tactic related to the deeper thoughts and emotions within the soul. Sounds are meant to show emotion not only through their volumes, and tonal shifts but through their articulate and linguistic styles of presentation. Lucier’s piece expresses the inner thoughts of sounds and its interconnectedness to our inner being.

We are able to contextualize Lucier’s written text and performance in the context of Aristotle based off the fact that Aristotle believed that voice was the soul hitting the air. In Lucier’s performance as time went on the sound became less and less distinguishable. This can be explained through Aristotle’s theory that I mentioned above. As Lucier initially speaks into the mic his soul hits the air, but as the loop begins it’s no longer his voice and his soul ceases to hit the air. Which is why the sound is indistinguishable as the video goes on. This also ties into the beliefs of Barthe’s as he stated that sound is too complex to be purely communticated. That’s also another reason why the sound in Lucier’s performance becomes more and more indistinguishable. The way humans make sound is a complex system. In fact it is so complex that even if you are able to capture sound and record it a machine like a speaker cannot purely communicate that sound. That is why as the loop gets deeper the sound is hard to make into words.

“Multiple Voices” by Cavarero and “Aristotle on Voice” both touch on the idea of voice and what one should take away from it. From the story of the king and the palace we learn that, “words… do not count for their semantic valence but only for their phonic substance” (Cavarero, 520). To me, this means that one should just listen and not always try to interpret. In other words, ignore the semantic and concentrate on the vocal. Looking back at Lucier’s written text and performance from this perspective might give us the idea to simply listen. In a way, the performance forces us to do this because as the recording goes on, the words go away. Though it is still the recording of Lucier’s voice playing, all we begin to hear is just a sound. This connects to Aristotle’s idea that “the sound we hear is always the sounding of something else, not the origin itself”. Lucier said it himself when he spoke about playing the recording so many times that the semblance of his speech is destroyed, but something else can come out of it. Maybe we can’t hear the words of Lucier as the recording goes on, but it is still his voice. From Aristotle’s perspective, Lucier’s voice has soul. They suggest that we should pay more attention to the soul of the voice, than the actual words, as it could lead us to find the “hidden and most genuine part of the person” (Cavarero, 522).

Lucier, Aristotle and Sterne all sought to understand, as Stefan G. Helmreich put it, “embodyment, the senses and how we understand those things scientifically, humanistically, culturally, philosophically” in the respective mediums we watched, listened and read. What was very interesting was how each respective medium understood the senses, more specifically sound. Aristotle was one of the first human beings to think of asking the question of why exactly sound happens and what exactly happens when we hear a sound. His understanding of sound was more philosophical than Sterne, who explained that the Sound Studies reader was written with “sound students” in mind. This scientific approach is even still different from Lucier’s understanding. Although he stated that he was, in fact, conducting a scientific experiment of sorts, his experiment focused on the overall experience, hence why it is a sound clip for us to listen to rather than a book for us to read like the Sound Studies Reader is.

 

Elements of both Aristotle and Sterne’s works are present in Lucier’s “I am Sitting in a Room”. I can imagine the sound waves of the playback recordings bouncing off of the assumedly smooth walls of the room Lucier is in and I can also agree with Sterne on the fact that the lack of a visual representation of Lucier’s experiment further immersed me in the audio experience. What Lucier’s audio seems to do is tie all three of these pieces together by taking the written assumptions and contextualizing them. Lucier gives both Aristotle and Sterne an outlet with which to test their theories or the average Joe an opportunity to grasp just what they were talking about, even if he didn’t originally intend to.

One of the major themes that is present throughout the texts that we’ve studied is that of inperfection. Indeed, when Lucier’s recordings are repeated, there is a slight change each time. In the original recording, the rendition of the original sound was not a perfect copy, but only mostly indicative. As such, each subsequent recording was a mostly accurate copy of the previous, eventually compounding onto each other into a composition that was ultimately completely different. That much was also clear when Aristotle emphasizes the inability of machines to have a voice. The output of the machine, in relation to the voice, is a mere sound that is meant to replicate it. Therefore, since the machine is seen as without a soul, it cannot make a truly accurate rendition of the sound of the voice, which does have a soul. The same spirit is true in Barthes’ argument, as he claims that one of the largest problems befalling musical description is related to imparting adjectives, which he sees as the most meager form of language. Though not outright mentioning the same topic as Aristotle, he too implies that beautiful sounds are simply too complex to be purely communicated, whether by human language in the case of music or by machines in the case of words.

When I was a little boy, I went to my grandparents’ house down in Alabama. My grandfather had a pool table that I would always use when I visited. I never understood why I was drawn to the pool table, but I guess it had to do with the sounds from the game. When I first broke the balls, the noise of the balls hitting each other and bouncing off the side of the table felt so soothing. Hitting the balls into the pockets creates an effect that’s like a swoosh noise. At the end of the game, nothing is more unique than the sound of the elusive eight ball going into the pocket. 

While I listened to Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in A Room” I noticed the obvious fact that he played a recording of what he just said to the point that one can’t understand what he is saying. I believe this has to do with the fact that he has a stutter. He is trying to make people understand what it is like to live with a speech impediment. He succeeds by not even sounding like a human being in the end. The way that people hear Lucier may differ, but I believe his goal is to make people realize what life in his shoes is like. 

• All my life I have been passionate about the game of baseball, specifically pitching. I often get asked what makes me love this oftentimes monotonous activity, and one of the few explanations I have is the sound of the ball hitting the catcher’s mitt. Baseball is a game where sound is always present and transforms the game into a full experience; the roar of the crowd, the ping of the bat, the coaches’ screams. As a pitcher however, nothing compares to the ball hitting the mitt. This sound affirms that the pitch was a success. It had passed the batter and safely gotten to the catcher for a strike.
• I understand Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in A Room” as his way of coping with and accepting his stutter. At the beginning of the voice recording, one is able to clearly hear and comprehend each word Lucier says. However, as time goes on and Lucier’s words are repeated, the words become less and less comprehendible until it is unrecognizable that the sounds one hears are even a human voice at all. I believe that Lucier does this to represent how he wants others to no longer be able to hear his stutter, as, similar to many others with speech impediments, he is self-conscious about his imperfect speech. The sounds towards the end of the video have qualities similar to music. Music, in all forms, is one of the most beautiful forms of sound. Lucier’s voice goes from something imperfect and broken due to his stutter, to a sort of melody that is beautiful.

The sound digs in and twists, like a spoon to the freezer-burned ice cream that is your brain. It’s not as noticeable in other situations – maybe the piano was your great grandmother’s and no one has tuned it since it was thrown into the basement, and its tinny keys might hurt your ears, but never as much as the sound of a piano being tuned. Whether your ears are blessed with perfect pitch or not, listening to the pitch wobble slightly above and below the note is enough to turn a quiet afternoon into a throbbing temple. The persistent beating of the finger on the keys along with the turning of the screws turns the once beautiful instrument, my baby, into something I dread to hear.

But it doesn’t stay that way. You thought it was fine before, just slightly below the pitch on your middle C and F sharp keys, but the awful twisting of the knobs and tightening and loosening of the strings has brought an even more beautiful sound into the air. In order to get to the promise land of a perfectly in tune piano, you have to go through the hell of the tuning. It could be a metaphor for life – change is hard, but the other side is clearer and sunnier once you get through the storm. One could say something similar to Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room”, as the piece changes drastically from the start to the beginning. It begins with spoken word, and goes through a transition to what could almost be described as music, the frequencies of the room. It may not be as beautiful as Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 2 No. 9, but the painful transition of underwater-like sounds brings it into a sound not far from music.

• One of the major sound experiences for me was actually walking the Davidson campus at night. It was an incredible blend of the noises of nature and those created by the nightlife of the college. While I will not venture to say that this has any narrative attached to it, I will say that the atmosphere definitely feels alive. The constant clicking that comes from the trees perpetuates energy in the air to tell me there is never a dull moment.
• The phenomena depicted in the video by Lucier has a totally different purpose than that of usual speech. It is interesting to listen to the hypnotic, ominous, and monotoned voice of Lucier and when I noticed this I discovered that the words were not quite that important. As the video went on I saw that the speech became more and more irrelevant and incoherent but what remained the same was the mood I felt from the sound. People perceive speech as a more manipulated sound to convey meaning, however, though this may be true, tone and sound are imperative in speech as to determine meaning and purpose. I don’t need to pay close attention to the words of someone just to know they are happy. Just as we know the mood when the beginning starts and how cold the voice is, I also venture to guess that if we listened in reverse order (incoherent to coherent) we would come to the same conclusion in the beginning.

The boom of the cannon reverberates over the thick humidity of the early morning. This sounds echoes through the trees, sends birds to flight, and startles children, startles women, starles me. This sound is held in reverence for moments – only to ushered out by equally powerful explosions into the African sky. The “twenty-one cannon salute”. It ushered in the morning and it soberly ushered out my grandfather and the village as they transported his body to its final resting place adjacent to the family house.

 

If Lucier identifies himself as a musician, then “I Am Sitting In A Room” must be digested by the audience as a concert piece with his voice, the recording equipment, and the room itself as the instruments that create “music” to evoke a certain feeling in his audience. As we give ear  to the “disappearance” of Lucier’s monotone repetition, we are able to hear the evolution of Lucier’s speech irregularity into a dissonant series of esoteric tones. (atleast to the human ear) Even though it is an experiment, the figurative application of this event to Lucier’s personal opinion of his speech impediment interests me.  I wonder if the disappearance of his impediment is what we ethically desire – or even what he desires. The awful, discordant noises that I heard in the comfort of my dorm, may have been euphonious to him because it removed his stutter.

(1)  As far back as I can remember I would turn on the television at night in order to go to sleep. Technically using a television to go to sleep does not make any sense due to its distracting nature. However, in my experience it allows my mind to go blank and actually rest. Everyday we hear sounds and our brains process them in order to make sense of our surroundings. At night the television allows me to cease that process and it takes over the responsibility thus allowing me to go to sleep. I have become so used to this process that I do not even hear the television. In fact I do not hear anything and before I realize it I am fast asleep.

(2) Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” made me think of the idea of redundancy and how redundant things often lose their meaning over time. For example, we’ve all had the experience of our parents saying the same thing over and over to us and eventually it loses its meaning. That happened in the video as the same sounds played over and over as a loop and eventually the words lost their meaning and became indistinguishable.

Sound is omnipresent. Even in a silent room, human ears pick up on distant sounds, whether they be from your pen scribbling against a piece of paper or the hushed buzz of the central air system in your house. These sounds flood our listening ears, creating environments composed of small, almost imperceptible noise. The Northern Spring Peepers became my favorite artists, singing as soon as the sun began to creep down the sky. Listening to them was a pastime and being able to hear their chirps evoked feelings of contentment. Growing up on the East Coast, the beach is where I found my solace. That is where life was simple, observing the gloomy Atlantic water as it crashed onto the rocky shores, full of seaweed and aquatic life. The sounds of the ocean being pulled in and out, swirling around jettied rocks as it struck the sand, composing the most harmonious songs. That was where my peace was built, constructed like the beach houses around me. These noises, the small and often disregarded rhythms, sing to me louder than any other melodies.

These melodies exist in Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room,” especially as the feedback loop becomes more potent. As soft spoken Lucier’s repeated speech gets continually played, his words begin to echo and mix together. What starts out as a clear, slowly drawn out, almost ariose speech steadily transforms into nothing but melodic noise. While Lucier’s audience is aware he is repeating himself, his words begin to blur together as he becomes less and less comprehensible. By the 15th minute, he is barely coherent and his voice ceases to create cognitive words. By the 25th minute, you seem to forget that he is speaking all together, as lyrical sounds resonate into an almost magical melody. His song is organic and fluid, reminding me almost of the cavernous sounds of whale calls and an oceanic domain.

Music, for me, has always been a series of memories and/or emotions; certain songs make me think of certain moments, like how “Love Like Woe” by The Ready Set makes me think of walking around my neighborhood with my friends on a summer evening as the wind blows against our faces, and the sun sets behind the bridge. Some associations I have with songs aren’t as pleasant, there are songs I can no longer listen to without being transported back to the worst of a past situation. These moments develop naturally, and most of the time, I do not realize them until I heard the song at a later date. Recently, however, I discovered that there are people who want to create or invoke these moods and memories, even if they aren’t their own. I observed this when one of my recommended songs on Youtube was “instagram” by Dean, but the title was “How Dean ‘Instagram’ would sound like with next door neighbors arguing + rain.” The uploader contorted the audio, muffling Dean’s voice, and added a track of rain and a track of an argument. The additional tracks gives the song a fuzzy feeling, one that I would compare to the static-like noise on a phone call, and it makes the song feel like it’s a tangible presence in the room. The rain and arguing give the song a more listlessness feeling. “instagram” always made me feel like it should be raining outside, but actually hearing it along with the song was a strange experience. By the time the song ended, the room felt quieter, more crisp, but also a little more empty.

The first few times Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” plays, I paid attention to what he was saying. But shortly after, the repetition made it easy to ignore the words and just hear white noise. This intensified as the audio started to become muffled. As a classmate stated, the long pauses, in a way, wipes the memory of the listener and clears the mind so that what the listener is hearing is new, which to a certain extent is true.

Around eleven minutes, the the audio sounded like a song. The beginning was similar to someone playing random notes, but about half way through the speech Lucier is giving, it sounds more intentional, like I can hear the music behind the muffled sounds. Around nineteen minutes, the audio just becomes sound, the voice unidentifiable. At this point, there is no way to hear the audio other than a strange music/just as rhythmic noise. Once I couldn’t understand the words anymore, the video actually became more enjoyable to listen to, which I think in part had to do with the fact that I was no longer trying to process the sounds as speech; my brain accepted them as noises, and I was free to focus on other things. When the video ended, it gave me a similar feeling to when Dean’s “instagram” remixed audio ended, a quietness.