taches the subject from the field of sound and, in combina- tion with its sonic aspect, provides a sense of in-between and plurality of the voice. Applying these ...
The Voice-Index and Digital Voice Interface Andrea Young
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theoretical understanding of the voice detaches the subject from the field of sound and, in combination with its sonic aspect, provides a sense of in-between and plurality of the voice. Applying these concepts to a digital voice instrument that includes voice-controlled electronics extends the functionality of the voice as an inaudible, live electronic interface. Musical applications of this new voice create an interpolation among voice, sound and media.
The Voice-Index The following conceptual overview of a voice-index serves as a model for my work with voice and electronics. Alice Lagaay traces the development “from a ‘positive’ account of voice in terms of presence and sound, to a more complex and ‘negative’ understanding of the voice in terms of absence and silence” [1]. Lagaay describes how in the early practice of psychoanalysis the voice began as a source of “truth”—beneath verbal communication, unintended sounds and unintelligible groans or cracks that escape through our speaking voice are “a symptom of, and gateway to, the unconscious” [2]. Roland Barthes described the grain of the voice as “the encounter between a language and a voice” [3] and noted that when signifying elements of language are separated from the sound of the voice, the voluptuousness of its signifiers are heightened. Mladn Dolar considered the Greek words phone (voice) and phonos (murder) and suggested that phonology reduces the voice to a matrix of sounds, maiming the full sonic expression of the voice [4]. As the voice moves from the interior to the exterior of one’s self, this movement between the positive and negative voice-index brings to question, “Is it the voice that one actually hears . . . or is a voice that has no empirical manifestation perhaps the voice in the proper sense, closer to the voice than the sounds one can physically hear?” [5] Lagaay summarizes Jacques Lacan’s theories as initiating a transition from an “understanding of the voice as a positive index of the hidden truth of the subject to a thoroughly negative concept of the voice as the empty left-over of a subject defined by lack, and whose desire, moreover, can never be fulfilled” [6]. Lacan’s theory connects voice to a place where desire “comes closest to touching the core of the subject whilst at the same time calling that subject’s very centre into question, revealing it to be inaccessible and empty” [7]. Connecting the positive voice-index of self and other with the negative voiceindex of imagination and silence has aided in developing my conceptual and musical understanding of an electronic vocal instrument. Andrea Young (composer-performer), 24979 Constitution Avenue, Stevenson Ranch, CA 91381, U.S.A. Email: . Web: . Supplemental materials such as audio files related to this article are available at .
©2014 ISAST doi:10.1162/LMJ_a_00186
The Digital Voice Interface The technical core of my work is made up of a network of possible interactions between the voice and abstract computer (Fig. 1) and has been implemented in Kyma from Symbolic he voice-index is discussed as Sound in collaboration with Pete a conceptual model for creating Johnston [8]. This instrument ala live digital voice. Vocal feature lows the singing voice to move away extraction employs the voice from the typically positivistic assoas a live electronic interface, referenced in the author’s ciations with voice and technology performative work. by expressing an “in-between” and dynamic interconnection of voices by providing a network of different signal paths. The five outputs are categorized by the pathways of generators, controllers and processors: acoustic voice, amplified/recorded voice, processed voice, voice-controlled synthesizers or samples and vocal deconstruction/reconstruction. The different outputs reveal their individuality, yet my compositional intentions rely on the gravity among them. The acoustic voice signal path contains the entire voiceindex and is the most reliable, immediate and located voice system. Through amplification, the captured and dislocated voice contains heightened micro-sounds, while the macrovoice becomes larger than life. The digitally processed voice ranges from a compressed voice to one of extreme sonic transformation, but in all these cases the voice is the generator and intrinsic to the audio output. This signal path can manicure the positive voice-index: voices of the recording industry emerge—positivistic gargoyles of vocal plastic surgery are modified through technology rather than physicality. Experimental artists use this signal path to extract a negative voice-index: distorting their voice into granules, morphing and time-stretching the voice until it becomes a new sound but the voice remains in the sonic output. The movement in-between the positive and negative voiceindex is made possible through voice-controlled electronics. This signal path occurs when vocal features are extracted and applied to parameters of the signal-processing algorithm and thereby have live control of the sound generator. The vocal features control the output of the synthesized sound and may have a close relationship to the information from the voice or may be far removed, but the vocal envelope tends to permeate the processing if these parameters are being mapped in real time. If I unhinge the breath from the synthesis design (changing time domains, smoothing or using a sample-andhold between the rate of emitted vocal data and the output of the synthesizer), the voice can become imperceptible as a controller. In my current work, the vocal features that I have
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extracted for signal controls are frequency, amplitude, brightness, breathiness, growliness, vibrato rate, vibrato depth and formants. Extracting these features changes the voice from sound source to information source, and each feature can be attached to the parameter of any imaginable sound. The “monophonic” vocal signal is seen here as having polyphonic parametric counterpoint within itself. Each parameter can move independently and in counterpoint with another and, extended through the computer, each parameter may be captured, collected, interrelated or time warped, with or without an audible trace of the vocal source. Figure 2 delineates three compositional applications of voicecontrolled electronics with the input on the left and three possible outputs on the right—synchronous, asynchronous and time warped. In the vocal deconstruction/reconstruction signal path, the vocal folds and
breath generate sound, but the audio output is the result of the signal being separated into two paths. The first path is a zero-crossing pulse generator representing the frequency component of the audio input. The second path is based on a vocoder representing the spectral content of the audio input. By separating the components of my voice and processing them further with filters and time-offsets, I can isolate the musical potential of audible control signals [9] before reconstruction. The sound of extracted vocal data can represent attributes of the positive voice-index and return an inverted or abstracted positive or negative voice-index.
Digital Voice Performances and Compositions My practice with this instrument is to invent ways that the computer differentiates and calculates the individual features
Fig. 1. Digital Voice Interface signal flow. (© andrea Young)
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Young, Voice-Index and Digital Voice Interface
in real time, and use these data streams in a variety of applications. Composing and performing feed into each other— the compositional design will invent the signal path, and the interaction of signal paths will realize the composition. With virtually unlimited synthesizers and variable timescales, this instrument can define a new voice, released from language, the physical body and cultural patterning. The voice may freely emit its acoustic sound while being unbound from the sense of self—the culturally constructed vocal qualities that over-accentuate the singular “I,” with overriding positivistic connotations, rather than singing with the sense of multiplicity that is so innate to the experience of the voice. Bocca (2012) is a composition that evolves from amplified voice to a combination of voice and voice-controlled synthesizers, concluding with purely voice-controlled sound. I performed this work in combination with Alo Al-
lik’s mikro:geen [10] (a gene expression programming machine and improvising system), where the vocal data streams controlled digital synthesizers in Kyma, while Allik’s artificial learning system mimicked these warped features and responded with genetically evolved synthesizers. Continuums (2013–2014) is a series of long-form works for voice and computer that investigates the fine detail and intense listening experiences inherent to the digital voice instrument. The first is a study of voice-to-sine tone—a smooth transition from amplified voice to sampled voice to additive resynthesized voice—and regresses until finally only the fundamental is audible. The second study focuses on the barely audible partials of the singing voice, which are collected and displaced in time. Exo/Endo: Voice-Infused Noise Machines (2014) is a large work for the digital voice instrument with singers, prepared turntables, electric bass and cello. Through live vocal feature extraction, the voice is connected to sound masses and noisebased synthesizers, ensuring that unique voices, rather than culturally affected replications, are enabled through voice and technology.
Post-Digital Listening I understand post-digital disenchantment and the delight with repurposed media, as my practice with the digital voice instrument includes collaboration with musicians using prepared turntables and tape. For the post-digital musician, “lo-fi misbehavior is embraced no matter whether in digital glitch and jitter . . . or in analog grain, dust, scratches or hiss, as a form of practical exploration and research that explores materials through their misbehavior” [11]. By hacking into the voice with digital technology and using voice-controlled electronics with noise-based synthesis, my voice can sound or be silent, hiss, scratch or be a low frequency oscillator, filter bank or melody. The digital voice instrument is invested in digital progress but has proven to coexist musically with alternative media—perhaps due to the repurposing of the voice. Post-digital listening could mean that we learn to hear music in the manner in which we hear voice—listening to the movement in between one sonic media and another, or from inside the mouth to the vinyl hiss. Listening is a physical aspect of using one’s voice—listening to the voice of others, or one’s own voice, to make adjustments, or the voices within the space of
Fig. 2. Three compositional applications of voice-controlled electronics. (© Andrea Young)
one’s mind. Lagaay discusses the mode of listening between analyst and patient in the early days of Freud’s psychoanalysis and points to Freud’s idea of a “floating attention.” This idea was furthered by Theodor Reik as listening “with the third ear,” which meant “focusing less on what is being said than on the movement and modulations of the voice as it speaks” [12]. This mode of listening can be directly connected to the musical applications I create with the digital voice instrument. The meaning is in the movement and modulations in between the plurality of voices that may merge, diverge or emerge, fusing the positivistic and signifying elements with the negative voice-index counterpart as the voice moves from digital, vinyl, magnetic or acoustic media. The voice I am seeking is without gender, culture or implied histories. The voice I am seeking sings silence and noise, wading through technology toward a released post-cultural voice. References 1. Alice Lagaay, “Between Sound and Silence: Voices in the History of Psychoanalysis,” e-pistime 1,
No. 1, Voice (2008) p. 53: . Accessed 25 November 2013. 2. Lagaay [1] p. 54. 3. Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985) p. 181. 4. Mladn Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) pp. 15–20. 5. Dolar [4] p. 83. 6. Lagaay [1] p. 57. 7. Lagaay [1] p. 59. 8. Pete Johnston, . 9. Agostino Di Scipio, “‘Sound Is the Interface’: From Interactive to Ecosystemic Signal Processing,” Organised Sound 8, No. 3, 269–277 (2003). 10. Alo Allik, . 11. Kunshal Aarhus, “post-digital-research” (2013): . Accessed 20 December 2013. 12. Lagaay [1] p. 55. Manuscript received 2 January 2014.
Andrea Young (DMA CalArts, MMus Institute of Sonology) is a composer and performer whose work focuses on voice and technology, with a particular emphasis on voice-controlled live electronics.
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Environment 2.0 Guest Editor: Drew Hemment In urban environments we are separated from the consequences of our actions as surely as the tarmac of the road cuts us off from the earth beneath. But between the cracks in the pavement, another world flourishes—local activism, recycling, environmental collectives, permaculture, urban gardening. Artistic and social projects can widen the cracks in the pavements. Such creative innovations might be artworks, social entrepreneurship, scientific intervention or innovations that harness everyday creativity. Leonardo is soliciting texts that document the works of artists, researchers and scholars involved in the exploration of sustainability in urban environments. Published authors include: Marcos Lutyens and Andrew Manning; Dermot McMeel and Chris Speed; Ruth Wallen; Gabriella Giannachi; Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison; Chris Welsby; Drew Hemment; Rebecca Ellis; Brian Wynne; Carlo Buontempo; Alfie Dennen and others. Authors are encouraged to submit manuscripts or proposals to . Leonardo submission guidelines can be found at Leonardo On-Line: .
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