Welcome to Vocal Systems

Hi, my name is Dave Evans and I’m an artist based in Liverpool, UK. This website is an ongoing repository for my work around vocal systems. It is hosted here in my home, on a shelf. Welcome.

After a period working here, at home, making and broadcasting the ‘noise’ of this space as part of my art practice, I reached something of a dead-end. As rich as the concept and aesthetic quality of noise is, what I was doing began to demand another frame. There is a logic of domestic space that is at once isolating and confining, while also being nurturing and generative. It is a collision of complex systems that both bind and support. Home is a place of flows and pauses, some fast, some slower, with bodies, materials, signals and currents intersecting and extending. Such is modern life, bodies and spaces are permeable across time and space as never before. How, then, to reframe the sound of this assemblage? While exploring this I came across a diagram of the human vocal system, and was excited to see that a human voice is the singular sonic result of a interconnected system. An element is brought into the lungs, air, before being pushed back out and shaped through a series of mechanisms, the larynx, the mouth, etc. This travels through air to be received by an ear, and a brain, or nothing at all. This produces something unique, ordinarily, no two voices are identical. It becomes the expression of a system, that can connect to other systems. This can be through language and song, or beyond language, through the quotidian language of coughs, tuts and sighs, or the expressive song of the whistle, hum or oohs and aahs. I found this fascinating and have become somewhat obsessed with the question: What is a voice and who or what gets to have one?

This question first surfaced in early 2024 and I have been working with it in different ways. Firstly, and crucially, I was awarded a residency at the Pervasive Media Studio at Watershed in Bristol. These few months gave me a real chance to shift the direction of my practice as I began to build speculative vocal systems. I began to use Pure Data as part of these systems, and have been building a ‘vocifier’ patch that draws together and processes live signals from a space. This work then evolved into performances for radio and other spaces. This is what is captured and discussed on this site. My other work can be found here