Sound, Sense, Babble and Speech : approaches to the spoken word

in contemporary sound arts practices

Abstract
This paper investigates the work of a selection of contemporary artists whose creative
practice is engaged with the spoken word. Although they come from a variety of
disciplines and backgrounds including music, sound art and performance poetry for each
of these artists sounded language and the spoken word provides the materials and often
the means by which they carry out their artistic investigations.
In the paper I identify and discuss similarities and differences between the various crossdisciplinary approaches to playing with words which run through their works within a
context of a variety of twentieth century sonic practices with language and the spoken
word. As such it is a step towards establishing spoken word composition as a distinct
area of creative practice and research within an interdisciplinary context.
All the sound contemporary works mentioned in this paper can be found on Playing with
Words: an audio compilation freely available online at www.gruenrekorder.de. A double
compact disc is also available from Greunrekorder.
Introduction
I have never really been that interested in words in music. I rarely listen to the words of
songs, I am not particularly interested in opera and my artistic output has mainly been
concert music, composition for dance and sound installation, generally conceptual and
abstract so it surprises me that 'playing with words' has become a major artistic and
research interest. In my own work with electroacoustic and acousmatic music
composition I first used recordings of non-verbal vocal sounds and later, words because
I wanted to refer to the world that I operated in, a world inhabited by people who had
memories, relationships, ideas, stories, good and bad moods and who interacted with
other people who also had all those things. One of the ways I found that I could do this
was by using recordings of people talking as my compositional material. I aimed to
organise this material musically using some of the same compositional methods and
ideas that I would use if I was dealing with purely instrumental sounds. But I also wanted
to keep the semantic meaning of the words intact as well as a sense of who was
speaking and the context for their speech. There seemed to be few rules laid down, and
apart from famous exceptions to be found in the works of Reich or Lucier, few examples
available to listen to. The initial compositional research led to a book (Lane 2008) and
audio compilation (Lane 2010) as well as a symposium at Tate Modern, a study day at
University of the Arts, London and this paper which draws on the generous participation
of many artists in different part of this research and on the insights gleaned from their
various presentations of their work. This paper aims to scope some trends in the works
of contemporary practitioners working with the spoken word who are represented on
Playing with Words: an audio compilation available online at www.gruenrekorder.de and
to start to relate them to historical precedents from the twentieth century.
The practices that I am writing about in this paper belong to a long, episodic artistic
investigation of language, specifically spoken language drawing influences from poetry,
music, song, theatre, typography and graphic art, philosophy, radio, performance art,
linguistics, fine art, literature and of course keen observation and experience of the very
many varieties of human communication that we all encounter and participate in every
day.
These creative re- renderings of speech all benefit from technology which both the

capturing of moments of human communication and facilitates its transmission and

deconstruction. In some cases technology is also the originator of speech. They can be
scripted, scored or recordings of natural speech; monologues, interviews, conversations;
with single or multiple voices; performed live or to the microphone; manipulated,
processed, deconstructed, repeated; spoken naturally or using specially developed vocal
techniques. The works are informed by many creative imperatives, inspirations and
enquiries as befits a genuinely cross disciplinary practice drawing heavily from music,
radio, literature, and poetry. Many of these works play with the tension between the
semantic and the abstract, the linguistic sign and the material sound, the idea and the
concrete noise.
In this paper I have grouped the selection of contemporary works that appear in the
Playing with Words audio compilation according to six main themes: Telegraphic
lyricism: contemporary sound poetry; , life and culture; Technological deconstruction;
The music in words; Drawing on the literary and Broken narratives.
2. Telegraphic lyricism: contemporary sound poetry.
Producing poetry with a sampling machine. Rhythmicly pounding words,
meditative mumbling, electronicly twisted speechsounds. Trying to generate
meaning through repetition. Techno poetry meets Dada. Just like a DJ the Sample
Poet works behind his machines, mixing, stretching, compressing the words to find
the magic moment, which might only be the moment of absolute non-sense.
Dirk HuelsTrunk website. 2010. http://www.soundslikepoetry.de/engllive.htm
2.1 Historical antecedents
The concerns of many contemporary artists relate back to their historical antecedents in
performance and composition. Sound poetry is still alive and well, particularly it seems in
Europe. Artists such as Jaap Blonk from the Netherlands and Japanese sound poet
Tomomi Adachi are still performing classic works from the sound poetry repertoire such
as Kurt Schwitters 'Ursonate' along with other voice performance works from the
twentieth century but they are also, in common with other sound poets including Dirk
Huelstrunk (Germany), Julien Ottavi (France), Joerg Piringer (Austria), and Amanda
Stewart (Australia) building and extending these traditions, writing and performing their
own solo sound poetry and in the case of Adachi also working with large, often nonprofessional voice ensembles which reflect the multi vocal, multi lingual performances of
Tzara, Hulsenbeck and Janco at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916.
The poets, performers and other artists working with sound in the early part of the
twentieth century sought to invent new languages and new words in order to express
their vision of reality and to deconstruct and reduce the power of language. In the 1910s
the Italian futurists sought to 'liberate' words. In his 1913 manifesto Imagination without
strings and words at liberty calls for
'the absolute freedom of images or analogies, expressed with unhampered words and
with no connecting strings of syntax and with no punctuation' and goes on to propose 'a
telegraphic lyricism with no taste of the book about it but, rather, as much as possible of
the taste of life'. (Marinetti (1913) accessed through
http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/destruction.html). In 1913 in Russia the grouping that
were to become the Zaum poets Burliuk, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov
issued their manifesto Slap in the face of public taste. Their demands included the 'that
the poets rights be revered: To enlarge the scope of the poets vocabulary with arbitrary

and derivative words (Word-novelty).To feel an insurmountable hatred for the language
existing before their time.' (Burliuk, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov at
://www.unknown.nu/futurism/slap.html). In the middle of the following decade tSwiss
based Dadaists, , Tzara and Ball sought to move away from tstandardization of
language. Avant garde literature scholar Rudolf Kuenzli has also suggested that 'Balls
experiments with sound poems might even be taken as an attempt to overcome the
language barrier in the Cabaret Voltaire, since the audience consisted of Russians,
French, Poles, Italians, Germans etc. who were all living in Zurich in order to escape the
First World War' .(Kahn, 2001, p.48). Kruchenykh's zaum, (named from the prefix 'za'
(beyond) and 'um' (mind)) also featured the invention of new words and new languages
to create 'a rubric that embraced the private languages of schizophrenics, folk
incantations, baby talk, glossolalia. random onomatopoetic verse and Futurist
neologisms' (Gordan in Kahn and Whitehead 1994, p212). The experiments carried out
under the banner of of Lettrism later in the 1940s
'added to the normal alphabet a phonetic speech register of 52 new characters:
the entire articulation of the human mouth, including clearing the throat, smacking
the lips, snorting, gargling, gurgling, squeaking, the ahems and ahums all these
vocal sounds which find their way into speech, not only to fill pauses, not only to
cover embarrassment and signal emphasis, but which can have the widest range
of meaning.' (Portner quoted in Cory in Kahn and Whitehead 1994 p353-4)
2.2 The contemporary sound poet (Blonk, Adachi,Ottavi, Piringer)
Many of the contemporary sound poets mentioned above move between the modes of
the written or scored, performed and recorded. Much of the work has moved so far away
from the kind of the language based experiments that might be expected to have
developed from the early twentieth-century forerunners that the original vocal source of
the sound material is often scarcely recognisable as emanating from a human rather
than from machine - is it heavily processed vocal material or is it actually electronically
generated and how much does it actually matter? Piringer's el-sys uses vocal samples
(we know that because he tells us) very rhythmically in a way that begins to sound like
hip hop beat boxing, a technique used in many of his sound poetry works and in Blonk's
Sunday Crunch the poetry has moved so far away from the voice that it is impossible to
hear the vocal or linguistic sources of the sounds which could be processed vocals or
synthesised they are certainly electronic and seemingly percussive but the title
suggests they might well have emanated in the mouth. The programme notes are not
necessarily more elucidating Blonk says the piece is partly based on samples from
'Frictional' (Lane 2008 p.33) although close investigation of the score sheds little light
and Piringer says that his vocal samples are arranged by a formal system that was
originally invented to describe the growth of plants (Piringer programme note in Lane
2010) Blonk has said
I have come to view the performance element less and less as interesting and
significant, and therefore I don't have such a strong urge anymore as I used to to
produce all sounds with the naked voice. I want certain sounds to come about.
How exactly that is done, is only of secondary importance.( Blonk and van Peer in
LMJ 15 2005).
This combination of Blonk's activities as a performing sound poet and a composer
working with electronics is reflected through the multi-faceted activities of many of his

European contemporaries who while sometimes adopting the title of sound poet can also
be working in the fields of electronic music, radio art, sound and visual electronic poetry,
interactive collaborative systems, online communities, live performance, sound
installation, computer games and video art (Piringer bio in Lane 2008 p98). Piringer, like
Adachi, also designs handmade and diy circuit-bent instruments and invents software for
automated manipulation of text and words including abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
probably the first sound poetry application for a mobile device (for the iPhone). Ottavi
describes himself as 'A mediactivist, artist-researcher, composer/musician, poet and
tongues destroyer, experimental film maker and anarchitect, ... involved in research and
creative work, combining sound art, real-time video, new technologies and construction
of electronic devices (Ottavi bio Lane 2010).
These artists hold their multifaceted multi facet, intermedia and cross-platformed
activities in common with previous sound poetry experimenters such as Schwitters,
Artaud, Marinetti, Fahlstrom in what Joanna Drucker has referred to as the synaesthetic
investigations of many early twentieth century artists and poets (Drucker, 1996,p.2).
They also share an interest in harnessing technology, particularly new technological
developments, to explore and extend both the voice and spoken language in
performance and for recorded media with many earlier twentieth-century experimenters
including Chopin, Dufrene, Scaeffer, Artaud and Heidsieck. But for many of the artists
mentioned above the voice and their vocal experiments are maybe more aligned with the
rest of their work in noise, new media and digital art so that the voice has become
another machine for the production of sound, one of many experimental tools and
horizons maybe only unique in its portability and ease of use.
2.3 Sound and Sense : sounding voice/written words (Huestrunk, Stewart, Biswas,
Bergvall)
However the physicality of the voice and its production is also directly investigated by a
number of artists and in some cases contrasted or compared with approaching the same
material in the printed page. Dirk Huelstrunk does not lay claim to as wide a spread of
activities as some of his contemporaries but works such as Ruaps and Analphabet an
investigation of the performing voice and its mechanisms following a mode of artistic
enquiry that started with Chopin and Dufrene. Huelstrunk places performance literature,
spoken word/ slam poetry and sound poetry at the core of his work which includes a
literary element manifested in his scores. While Analfabet (Lane, 2008, p22) is an
attempt to retrospectively the performing of the sound poem that can be heard on the
audio compilation, Huelstrunk also makes more conventional performance scores (Aga
Ong ((Lane, 2008, p24) and Alltag (Lane, 2008, p25) which are half way between a
poem and or written inscriptions of works to be performed. Adachi also publishes his
sound poems as concrete poetry (Anata 5(Lane, 2008 )) and as performance
scores.(NU (Lane, 2008, p14)).
Amanda Stewart's poem Sound and Sense list of 'sound and ....' which reveals some of
the many qualities of sound
sound and noise
sound and music
sound and sense
sound and absence
sound and voice
sound and memory
The sonic version reveals new qualities of sound, qualities that can't easily be captured

in words but are exposed perfectly in this recording where sense drifts in and out of a
sound world that is intoned, recorded, delayed and played back against itself in a
canonical form and gradually drones into what again appears to be a electronically
generated sound. While the sonic version comments and adds to the content of the
written poem it also renders it non-understandable so that neither version contains the
whole poetic statement which sits somewhere between the co-existance of the sonic and
the literary making more than the sum of their parts. This example serves to highlight the
importance of interpretation (in this case mainly done through technical means) where
the poem is written to be performed or recorded.
Not all artists working with performed vocal exploration are drawing on the European
sound poetry tradition but they share the artistic concerns regarding language and
sound, learning language and delivering spoken language in performance. In his own
work entitled Sound and Sense (Lane, 2008, p41) Ansuman Biswas meditates on his
experience of trying to learn konnakol, a form of vocal percussion, part of the South
Indian Carnatic music tradition, 'Konnakol is a langauge with strictly defined grammer
and syntax, but in contrast to Malayalam or sanskrit or English, it refers to no objects in
the world. It is semantically empty. Konnakol means nothing. It is simply a mirroring of
the sound of the drums. (Biswas in Lane, 2008, p43). In a text that can be read in parts
as a companion piece to Huelstrunk's score for Analfabet Biswas tries to write in words,
'fuzzy haloes of meaning' about what it is like to learn language, in particular this
language that has no meaning. While Huelstrunk concentrates on describing the details
of the physical delivery of the vocal sounds of the sound poem in performance, Biswas
tries to put into writing the cognitive and physical processes of learning language.
'conscious effort to remember a sequence of sounds marshalls associations and
allusions. I use tracks and references to discern patterns and systematise what had at
first seemed random. ... I need to tether the wild beast into what is already domesticated,
what I already know.' (Biswas in Lane, 2008, p44).
This notion of difference between the written and the sounding is taken up by Caroline
Bergvall in Ridewhere the sound of the pen scratching on the paper becomes part of the
artist's own commentary on her processes of composition and the medium that she has
chosen to work in. As the artist's commentary on her ongoing written process progresses
the interchangability of 'ride' and 'write' become apparent in a way that it could not solely
from the printed page. The inter-changability depends on Caroline's pronunciation and
accent her English is individually accented by her French, Norwegian heritage so in
speaking in her very individualised voice she also implicitly comments on English as it is
spoken.
3 Language, life and culture
3.1 Demarcation (Voegelin, Wynne, Stidworthy)
Whoever says language says demarcation, signification and communication
(Kristeva 1989 p4). Much of Caroline Bergvall's multilingual poetics mixes languages
(including those of her French, Norwegian heritage) in her performance writing playing
with areas of commonality of sound and meaning as well as their distinctive differences.
In common with many contemporary artists working with the spoken word, she is dealing
less with the invented or the deconstructed and more with examining and revealing the
experiences and complexities of contemporary society by engaging with how spoken
language works and manifests itself. Many of the works of these artists focus on and
reveal how we negotiate and transmit meaning between individuals and groups, across

and between languages and the translations of those languages, across cultures and in
some cases, generations. This work exhibits a high level of sophistication compared with
those mistrustful approaches to language adopted the early part of the twentieth century.
Of course there have been huge developments in the understanding of language since
then and the study of linguistics and the psychology and philosophy of language has
developed and proliferated into areas including phonology, phonetics, historical
linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics. sociolinguistics, language variation,
language acquisition and morphology, to name a few. 'The conception of language as
the key to man and to social history and as the means of access to the laws of societal
functioning constitutes perhaps one of the most striking characteristics of our era, and as
such is definitely a new phenomenon.' (Kristeva 1989 p)
The problem of the pronunciation of foreign languages, the correlation between written
and sounding language, cross language understanding and by suggestion, crosscultural understanding informs Salom Voegelin's work The Barry Echo which
complement Biswas's statement that 'It becomes clearer when you're a foreigner.
Languages consists of grunts, tics, gestures, tones, melodies, flourishes, and steps as
much as discrete words. Sounds are fuzzy haloes of meaning rather than fixed objects.
Writing obscures this fact'. (Biswas in Lane 2008 p42). The importance of enunciating
these grunts, tics and tones correctly is highlighted in The Barry Echo which features a
recorded conversation between an English speaker reading the local South Wales
newspaper to, we are told, his blind mother. The reader often stumbles over the reading
aloud of the Welsh words, mainly place names,in the stories, and is gently corrected by
the listener. This reading aloud of the local paper, is loosely based on Austrian author
Thomas Bernhard's book The Voice Imitator: 104 Short Stories in which the author
writes 104 parable-type stories based on newspaper reports and hearsay, also reveals,
through the kind of stories that are related and the language, both a parochiality and a
universality of experience but differentiated by small details. The fact that the majority of
the language is shared and correctly pronounced and understood hints also at the
cultural differences that might still exist between England and its long conquered and
annexed neighbouring country, Wales.
The Welsh language has undergone a revival in the last forty years through a
programme of bi-lingualism in schools, on official signage and in the media. The fate and
cultural place of endangered languages is highlighted through the words of Kuliltxw'm
Saax (aka Bob Wilson), a speaker of the endangered language , who in the extracts
from John Wynne's remix of Anspayaxwgives an idea of how fits into his culture. To Play
or Not to Play (Wynne in Lane 2008, p80) he points out the ethical and aesthetic issues
around his artistic work involving recordings of speakers of endangered languages and
meditates on how to deal with difference without exoticising or reducing his subject.
Imogen Stidworthy explores language to expose the nature of human relationships as
well as the gaps in cultural understanding that can occur between individuals particularly
those from different cultural or national backgrounds. Stidworthy's recordings of
Papiementu jokes reveal both the obviously hybrid nature of the language which, like so
many others has absorbed many linguistic elements of its trading and colonial past but
also reveals how forms of communication can transcend language barriers. The form of
the joke is recognisable even if it's meaning isn't and the recording gives the sense that
the speaker is surrounded by a rapt audience who are drawn into the joke by shared
experiences and cultural references. This provides a sharp contrast with Transmission
(Stidworthy in Lane 2008 p161) where the transcribed conversation reveals a huge

cultural and knowledge-based divide and by implication a power imbalance as once of

the speakers becomes the holder of worldly knowledge and the other a kind of
supplicant or child.
3.2 Silence (LaBelle, Brown Sierra)
Just as Stidworthy has labels and identifies the jokes through their title Brandon
LaBelle's piece, Reading Silence also announces its subject matter. However in this
case identification requires slightly more specialist knowledge than the easily identifiable
and universally shared format of the joke. The silence that LaBelle refers to is Cage's
silence the non silence or the impossibility of silence in one of the most influential
writings in the development of music and sound art Silence (1973).Cage's silence is
filled with sound but the Silence being read by LaBelle's subject is a very different
silence. Her enunciation and the quality of her voice sounds unusual, it is also unclear
what language she is speaking it is not readily familiar. It is not entirely easy for her to
read out loud, sometimes she hesitates, sometimes stumbles. The materiality and the
physicality of the voice are made very apparent in the close recording which in itself
provides a comment on Cages ideas the voice is not a disembodied voices , it is not
just once sound it is a voice that emanates from mouth, driven by a tongue formed by
lips lubricated by spit it is a very physical voice. There is no background sound the
reader seems very alone. LaBelle explains in his programme notes that the reader is
and speaking Slovenian. He asks the question how does silence feel for those who
cannot hear, and how do Cage's ideas function within the experience of deafness? Much
of LaBelle's recent work explores sound and silence and how they have been
manifesting themselves through the theory and practice of sound art.
Brown Sierra's Culture of Silence also gathers and reflects various cultural ideas of
silence by sourcing and cutting up descriptions from written texts (Brownsierra in Lane
2008 p85). The realisation of Culture of Silence as an audio piece gives another audio
based take on what we often think of as silence and the markers of silence.
'So long did he sit with the receiver to his ear
He did not want to listen
To remain silent for so long' (Brownsierra in Lane 2008 p87)
3.3 Theatre of subversive voices (Pamela Z, Wegener, Karikis)]
While LaBelle and Brownsierra comment on the cultural interpretations and associations
around the notion of silence other artists are commenting on, gently challenging and
subverting some widely-held contemporary cultural 'rules' and beliefs and questioning
the ownership of language and the making of meaning, the power invested in language
and how that is revealed as well as issues concerning the languages of officialdom and
the languages of ordinary people.
In and on your left Pamela Z gently challenges the culture which fetishises the white
cube as a place for the display of art. Through her ongoing commentary she questions
the primacy of the visual over the other senses and the pokes gentle fun at the
determination of the gallery to either wipe out the evidence of other sensory modes or to
just ignore them. In doing this as a sound piece she also raises questions about the
place for sound art or other forms of art in the white cube 'art' gallery. Radio continental
drift (aka Claudia Wegener) provides a platform for voices which are normally unheard.
The voices and songs which have been recorded through community projects in South
Africa present other histories and other points of view in contrast to the 'official' voices,

identifiable as belonging to the BBC or some other bastion of 'non-aligned' media

reporting which introduce and frame the work. DURBAN SINGS rough radio juxtaposes
official history with oral histories gathered and mixed from the internet archive of
recordings that can be freely accessed and mixed to provide an implicit commentary and
addendum on the history of South Africa and the end of apartheid as a mediatised
mythology and also as a revelation and reminder of the power and control of information
that the media holds, a power that this project seeks to reverse. Mikhael Karikis's
interdisciplinary practice emanating from his background in music, architecture and
visual art, fuses performance art and music. In esimorP (extract) he creates a link
between subject matter, persona and delivery as he performs as a 'suited male City
office-worker' (Karikis programme note in Lane 2010). In this extract words are heard
trying to escape his lips ?but those lips are sealed. Small fragments of words escape
mainly the isolated fragment 'p' gradually the word 'promise' emerges. Kirikis says that
'One aspect of his practice ... challenges the relationship of the voice to the politics of the
male body, masculinity and language' (Karikis biography in Lane 2010). In esimorP
(extract) he draws from oaths of secrecy practiced in the City financial businesses and
in common with the Cabaret Voltaire artists in 1916 and the works by Voegelin, LaBelle,
Wegener, Wynne, Karikis and Stidworthy are concerned with the power relationships
revealed between languages and their speakers.
3.5 Located voices and communication
(Corringham, Lane, Carlyle, Biswas)
The subject matter of Wegener's voices locate them in a definite time and place. Other
artists are using the located voice to say something about man's relationship with nature
and other species or to investigate a socio-geographical space/place or time though the
capturing of voices as part of making field recordings or conducting conversation and
interviews that delve into the social, cultural and historical aspects of place as well as
using existing oral history or archive material. These works of sonic portraiture or 'documusic' (Lane, 2006) including Viv Corringham's Skywalks and my own work Tweed. In
each work the artists composes a portrait of place, time or industry that moves between
documentary and abstraction, the radiophonic and the musical, the voice and the
ambient and keynote sounds of the place. Both spend a lot of time in their chosen
locations, looking, listening, recording, sometimes engaging with people and for them
the people, their voices and their stories are inseparable from the place - voices and
locational sounds are used to build up an overall aural picture. Corringham uses her
singing voice as she improvises and retells the stories and sounds that she has
encountered on other visits to the skyways of Minneapolis while Lane's research-led
practice makes use of interviews and encounters as well as additional oral history
material from existing archives. Both artists are part of the place and space they are
depicting for the listener as one of the many presences in these multi-inhabited spaces.
Although Ansuman Biswas and Angus Carlyle also place their work firmly in the
landscape they present a simpler picture less peopled by and thus their own presence is
more apparent. Both Biswas's 23:36,13/12/2009, +12 46', +77 33' and Carlyle's
Kiyosumi have no obvious editing or processing. Both touch upon the nature of
communication or non-language based conversations or language games. Carlyle's
recording of his engagement with a little boy's pre- and semi-lingual Japanese toddler
babble and the sounds that the child makes as he plays remind us of the basic nature of
so much communication and also of the joy of making sound. Biswas's late night
recording of himself in 23:36,13/12/2009, +12 46', +77 33' in a national park in India

places him firmly within that landscape. We imagining him sitting and listening gradually
improvising with and then developing a counterpoint to the rhythm of the cicadas.
Each of these four artists places themselves in their chosen frame and, through the use
of their own voice, bodily locates themselves as a participant in that time, space and
place - a visitor in their own picture.
4. Technological deconstruction (Wishart, Bodin, Moffatt, Language Removal
Services)
'... this same word can be broken down into morphological elements, morphemes, which
are smaller than it is, and are themselves bearers of signification. A group of morphemes
constitutes the signification of the word.' (Kristeva 1989 p.15)
For Biswas remembering and enunciating the 'empty sounds', phonemes spoken for
decoration or for rhythmic pleasure, in konnakol provide a physical challenge for the
speaker. This detachment of phonemes from any possible semantic meaning has much
in common with the performance works of Blonk, Huelstrunk and Piringer as discussed
earlier. However each of the artists mentioned in this section use technology to
deconstruct the word and separate it from all possible meaning and to play with the
result to to create a kind of semi-disembodied spatialised word play.
In a body of work almost entirely concerned with the spoken word, spanning four
decades, Trevor Wishart has undertaken varied and often technologically driven
approaches to his material. In Globalalia (extract), a play on the word glossolalia
referring to a sort of fabricated, meaningless speech, Wishart gathers thousands of
syllables from the media in many different languages, extracts them from context and
meaning so that only texture, pitch shape and other musical and sculptural parameters
are left. With this material Wishart construct a spatial symphony of voices, speaking but
saying nothing, preserving the connection to the human body but detaching it from
meaning, culture, society and communication. A similar approach to the recording and
musical re-working of vocal material is taken by Lars-Gunnar Bodin, who, with Bengt
Emil Johnson, coined the term 'text-sound-composition'. Bodin is a composer whose
influences include the concrete poetry of yvind Fahlstrm. He probably speaks for
many of the artists mentioned in this paper when he says 'composing has a much wider
meaning than just writing music. In principle composing means that all sorts of basic
materials used within the arts, sounds, visual elements, words, etc. can be put together
by the same author.' (Bodin biograhical note in Lane 2010). His work The Lipton Voice
Machinery #2 reworks material recorded from the performance of a previously live work
to make a new musical composition which again preserves the recognisably human
source of the material while divorcing it from any coherent meaning. This playfulness of
the work reflects to some extent the fact that the original material was recorded by
singers rather than speakers.
Ellen Moffatt's work f_l_w_z is part of a larger multi media engagement with multiple
channels of spatialized sound and polyphonic composition using phonemes (the
granular units of spoken language) from the International Phonetic Alphabet as note
events. Part of the 'Phoneme Project' (2005-2008), f_l_w_z is an interactive text image
work. Much of Moffat's work is also concerned with recordings of the spoken word
'The recorded spoken word recurs in my work. My interest in the spoken language
is personal, political, social and intellectual. Words are integral to daily life. We
listen, hear, speak, write and read. We create stories that we tell to ourselves and
to each other. Voice is a conduit. As an original instrument, voice integrates breath

and the physical body with the mind. It connects one body to other bodies as the
beginning of the collective. As a concept, voice promotes communication,
exchange, individual, collective and Other identities and political positions. For me,
the spoken language is about hearing these voices. ... Sound embodies the
disembodied body; the opposite may also occur. Fragmented sound requires us to
re-consider language, meaning and limitations.'
(Ellen Moffat website http://www.ellenmoffat.ca/?cat=23)
The residual physical embodiment of the disembodied recorded spoken word is central
to the work of Language Removal Services. The 60 second Anthology of American
Poetry is one of a series of works which remove all but non-verbal utterances from the
recording of iconic figures, creating static language portraits, 'a rich source of clues to
the motivations and realities which hide behind the often times tangled web of meanings
which is language'. (Language Removal Services in Lane, 2008, p188) It is amazing how
public figures like Naom Chomsky, Marilyn Monroe remain recognisable suggesting that
something of the essential material body is transmitted through the small and inexact
sounds that remain when language is removed. (these can be listened to as part of the
Static Langauge Sampler at http://www.languageremoval.com/history/statsampler.php).
In the Ambitious Project for World Peace (Lane 2008, p186) LRS question how much
you can know about somebody or trust them from these sounds and reminds us that
language is a construct, a signifying layer separate from what he calls our 'speaking
body', 'the venomous cloak with which we keep our neighbours at bay, construct borders
and build boundaries around our humanity' (LRS in Lane, 2008, p188).
5 The Music in Words (Jones, Lapelyte, Gardner, Garrelfs, Drever and Upton,
Vincent, Bossetti,Lansky, Truax, abAna)
While Wishart, Bodin and many of the other artists already mentioned have engaged
with the musicality of their material there is a significant body of work in which the
spoken word is used primarily for its musical qualities. Some of these works such as
those by Sianed Jones, Lina Lapelyte, Iris Garrelfs, Thomas Gardner and the duo of
John Drever and Lawrence Upton are recordings of live performance works whilst others
compose with the recorded spoken word in such a way as to emphasis a particular
musical parameter (Bossetti, Vincent, Lansky) or as material to create a specific effect
(Truax). Jones, Lapelyte and Gardener are all string players and along with Iris Garrelfs
and the duo of John Drever and Lawrence Upton are, in the works on this audio
compilation, working with technology to incorporate live electronics and recorded sound
in either improvised or scored performance. While these works could not be regarded
as songs in any conventional sense they have, in many cases, the same ingredients as
an accompanied song from a singer/songwriter yet somehow the proportions and blend
of those ingredients is significantly different in common with work by other experimental
vocal performers such as Laurie Anderson and Joan La Barbara. Sianed Jones three
screen video installation performance work Taliesin derives its harmonic, melodic and
abstracted vocal material from the works of the sixth century Welsh poet, Taliesin. In the
performance of 12+2 Lina Lapelyte triggers both sounds and electronic processing with
her feet keeping her hands and voice free to play the violin and speak creating a lush,
rich soundscape composition. Thomas Gardner uses his speaking of the text of the
Heine poem Der Tod, das ist die khle Nacht to control the live processing and six
channel diffusion of the cello performance. Garrelfs work K is a recorded vocal and live
electronic improvisation on the letter 'K' while recordings of Upton's visual poems are
manipulated and composed by Drever for playback and further electronic processing in

performance.
The works by Alessandro Bossetti, Paul Lansky and Michael Vincent all make use of
melodic and rhythmic extraction, translation and elaboration of meaning ,
'The melodies or rhythms of the spoken word are extracted and taken up by other
elements in the work, (again) this may reinforce meaning but it also may be a
purely abstract device. e.g. Paul de Marinis works included on Music as a Second
Language (1991) which deals primarily with speech melodies as musical material
as does Lanskys Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion (1978-9) and
Reichs Different Trains'.
(Lane 2006)
Vincent's Dying Aint Bad Yall for tenor saxophone and pre-recorded voice simply aims
"to portray the speaking voice as a musical instrument" (Vincent programme note in
Lane 2010). Vincent sees the reinforcement of meaning by the saxophone as essentially
'enabling the listener hear the text more as music than language' (Vincent programme
note in Lane 2010). Paul Lansky's Now and Then plays with the musicality of phrases
commonly found in fairy stories and children's literature of the sort that is often read out
loud as a bedtime story in 'an attempt to infuse the sounds of ordinary, everyday life with
the magic of music' (Lansky in Lane, 2008, p109). As the phrases mount up on top of
each other their melodic and rhythmic contours are extended and traced by melodic
clusters of synthesised tones which bring out the music of the words. In Bossetti's A
Coloro Photo of the Horse the looped spoken-word phrase also generates the non-vocal
melodic and rhythmic material which, as the phrase is repeated over and over again,
heightens its melodic and rhythmic features and starts to dissolve the listeners
perception of its seemingly nonsensical semantic meaning.
However in Truax's Shaman Ascending the vocal material accumulates meaning through
the staging of the performance in which the listener is in enclosed by a circle of eight
loudspeaker through which the repetative vocal chanting circles and develops speed and
timbral complexity over the duration of the work. The spatio/gestural metaphor that is
created heightens the associative quality of the sound material referring to a genre of
real world vocal usage (that belonging to shamanistic practices) rather than a specific
meaning or event. This kind of invocation has parallels with performances by English
sound poet Bob Cobbing. The early recording of the AbAna trio consisting of Bob
Cobbing, David Toop and Paul Burwell has Cobbing, like a high priest or shaman
incanting and invoking his Alphabet of Fishes (see Lane, 2008, p128) while Toop and
Burwell improvise a score.
6. Drawing on the literary (Landy, Mafe, Hanson, Ottavi)
While much of this work inhabits an area within and between the literary and the
musical, some work are more directly related to literature using it in combination with
other sound sources, as improvisational material or as a mechanism for controlling some
other parameter or by translating stylistic elements of an original text to shape a new
work.
The work of Gertrude Stein is a popular choice. Stein's experiments with written
language provide text and inspiration for Leigh Landy's Rock's Music. In this live piece
the performer plays with and converses with his recorded self to gradually build a
complex, spatialised, nonsensical mesh of conversational bits and pieces that become

increasingly difficult to follow. By contrast Majena Mafe plays with the repetitive aspects
of Stein's work. In Let Her Be..., an extract from a larger ongoing opera project, she
sonifies the written text using a computer voice to produce what Mafe terms
experimental sounded language. In Sten Hanson's Variations on a Theme by Laaban he
uses a short phrase from sound poet Ilmar Laaban's live performance work Tre brev
frn den dove to play with the semantic meaning of the phrase through slight
pronunciation differences and re-ordering of the words and uses processing and
repetition to create the variations. Julien Ottavi's Shut your eyes and see uses text from
James Joyce, another literary experimenter. The text is exploded - masked by the
sounds of explosions as well as moving in and out of audibility and comprehension to
form a complex tapestry of voice and synthesised sound. The language becomes noise
- something is being said - but it is unclear what or why.
7. Broken narratives
(Norman, Weaver, Mulayim, White, Parry)
New narratives are the driving force behind this last group of works. All use an original
narrative that relates to lived experience, either that of the artist (Norman), or woven
from many sources (Parry, Mlayim, White, Weaver). They are all oblique, never quite
stating their subject matter, the listener has to work hard, make presumptions and fill in
the gaps. These narratives are fractured, broken up and de- and re-constructed. Parry's
My Name is Sarah Simpson is a further development of a performance piece he
developed from a message left on his telephone answering machine (Lane, 2008 p189).
My Name is Sarah Simpson weaves a multi-voiced composition from the telephone
voices which promise alleviation from debt whilst offering implicit critique of the services
industry. White's Eternally Unfinished Attempt to Grasp Everything as it Happens (in only
one language), an extract from a recording of an interactive installation in which many
voices relay statistical information gathered from a number of sources at timings related
to the content - so some will be sounded every second, some only every week to create
a constantly change texture and rhythmic interplay of voices and a changing reflection
of aspects of the real world. In Lost Souls Ekrem Mlayim uses the voices and
autobiographical details of his scratch speech choir, played with and processed live to
form a score and reconfigured and recomposed on the computer to create a series of
rich and varied vocal textures. Katharine Norman's first person piece Losing It takes her
experience of insomnia as the inspiration for a composed electroacoustic meditation
scripted for and between the internal voices that prevent her sleeping and that try to
encourage her to sleep. While in Julian Weaver's Certain Irregularities we hear a women
narrating episodes of past events, nothing is specific, the musical accompaniment in the
form of a slightly irregular pulse and tentative chordal accompaniment serves to give the
words a dreamlike quality. The words can be understood but we are not entirely sure
what they are about. Both this and Losing It have a strong visual quality conveyed
mainly through the distinctive voice and words of the single female narrator, it is almost
impossible to listen without imagining the speakers and the place that they inhabit. This
is ' theatre for the ear' musical more than radiophonic but redolent of the artifice of the
staged theatrical event.
Conclusions
The artists discussed in this paper come from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds
including fine art, musical composition and performance, sound art and performance
poetry but for each them sounded language and the spoken word provides the materials
and often the means by which they carry out their artistic investigations. Many of them
reflect, develop and bring new and more sophisticated means of production to the

concerns of their artistic predecessors such as what it is to make sound, how language
is formed and the points at which spoken language and written language diverge.
However new concerns have also emerged, most strikingly with the relationship of
language to life and culture through investigating how language operates in the
everyday, how it reflects and signifies the working of power relationships and the
unspoken rules of contemporary multi-cultural societies and how it may be used to
question them. These works weave small histories about the individual's place in society
and interrogate how the world sees words - particularly words which relate to sound and
silence. Many are harnessed to everyday life by voices with their own distinctive timbral,
rhythmic and melodic sonic qualities, spoken by people bearing witness or expressing
their experiences. These voices carry information about age, gender, health, nationality,
education and in some cases function, some are recognisable or iconic but all animate
and bring words to life.
Bibliography
Burliuk D, Kruchenykh A, Mayakovsky V, Khlebnikov V. 1917 Slap in the face of public
taste at http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/slap.html
Cory M. E. 1994 Soundplay the polyphonous tradition of German radio art. In D. Kahn
and G. Whitehead (eds.) Wireless Imagination Sound Radio and the Avant-Garde. MIT
Press.
Drucker, J. 1996 The Visible Word Experimental Typography and Modern At 1909 1923 University of Chicago Press.
Goldberg R. 2001 Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present London, Thames and
Hudson.
Gordon, M. 1994 Songs from the Museum of the Future Russian sound creation (1910 1930). In D. Kahn and G. Whitehead (eds.) Wireless Imagination Sound Radio and the
Avant-Garde. MIT Press.
Kahn, D. 2001 Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. MIT Press, 2001
Kristeva, J. 1989 Language the Unknown An Initiation into Linguistics. New York,
Columbia University Press.
Lane C. 2006 Voices from the Past: Compositional Approaches to using recorded
speech, Organised Sound Volume 11, Number 1
Lane, C. 2008 Playing with Words: the spoken word in artistic practice. London,
CRiSAP/RGAP
Marinetti, F.T. 1913 Destruction of SyntaxImagination without stringsWords-inFreedom at http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/destruction.html Marinetti
Van Peer R. 2005 Sounding the outer limits Jaap Blonk and Ren van Peer Leonard
Music Journal, December 2005, Vol. 15, Pages 62-68 available at
www.jaapblonk.com/Talking/LeonardoMusicJournal_2005.rtf

Discography
Lane, C. 2010 Playing with Words: an audio compilation available to download and as a
CD from www.gruenrekorder.de. The online version and the CD version differ as to the
length and in some cases the choices of artists works.