Performed at home in South Liverpool and broadcast live on September 3rd 2024 on WGXC 90.7FM’s Audio Buffet.
I had another chance to perform another live broadcast with WGXC 90.7fm at the start of September. In the broadcast description I describe the performance as ‘choral’, which raised an important question around how these events are framed, namely are these performances the singular expression of a vocal system, or are they the combined voices of different interconnected systems? Research during the residency at the Pervasive Media Studio presented me with the image of a vocal system as a set of interconnected sub-systems. At the base in the power source, in humans the lungs and the muscles that control the movement of air in and out. This moves to the phonatory system that produces the sound, in humans the larynx with the focal folds and glottis. Finally, the resonatory system that further shapes the sound using the throat, mouth, tongue, teeth, lips etc. All of this springs into life at the behest of the brain, sitting at the top. However, the voice then travels through the air before being received by an ear. Here a different set of systems take over to receive the sounds. It has been an interesting thought experiment to map this onto different systems, asking ‘what is the power driving this voice,’ or ‘what sub system is generating the sound’ or ‘where does the articulation occur?’ In a physical sense I can see a correlation between the AC current flowing into our home and the breath of a voice, or an EM sensor near to a mains socket and the phonemes it produces, but conceptually, a home does not have the coherence of the human body. Each body’s voice has a singular power source in it’s own breath, a singular configuration of larynx and mouth. The home, on the other hand, is a restless confluence of things flowing in and out (but maybe the human body could be said to be the same?). As I scale up from the body to speculate on wider vocal systems, multiple power sources converge, different resonatory opportunities arise, and other ways of shaping these sounds become available. The human voice has a verticality to it, it operates sup and down, whereas the speculative vocal system of a space is more horizontal, possibly demanding that I find a different image. I think I arrived at ‘choral’ to describe the system as it perhaps has a sense of this horizontality, but as it describes ‘organized singing bodies’ perhaps it falls short. There are lots of images that could work here perhaps, the Deleuzian assemblage, etc, I will investigate further.
Again, for the broadcast four sensors around the house created sounds that are then processed and harmonised in the Vocifier Pure Data patch before being sent to WGXC’s steaming server and FM transmitter.
