One of the best Resonance FM podcast series is focused, as its name puts it in an admirably straightforward way, on the Voice on Record. The series, hosted by Sean Williams, shares various audio examples that emphasize human speech.
In the past, this has involved everything from children’s records to the landing of man on the moon to early modern poets. The November 17, 2009, episode of Voice on Record, just posted online earlier this week, focuses on the sound of the voice in experimental music and sound art (MP3). Among the pieces heard is work by Luciano Berio. In between examples, Williams discusses the origins of this sort of music in not only technological advances, but in the culture of experimental radio. The segment, the 12th in the Voice on Record series, is titled “The Voice in Musique Concrète and Electronic Music.”
Full details at resonancefm.com. More on Voice on Record‘s Williams and this specific segment of the series at sbkw.net.
Not a whole lot of vocal music gets covered on Disquiet.com, for reasons that have somewhat eluded me, though came into mental focus when I read the following recently in Martha Mockus’s book Sounding Out (Routledge, 2008), a critical overview of the work of Pauline Oliveros, the avant-accordionist and deep thinker about improvisation and listening. This is Oliveros speaking, as quoted in Sounding Out:
“I figured out a practical use for the overtone series. As you know tones consist of not one but many overtones. If you listen carefully you can hear them. The tone quality of any instrument depends on the prominence of these overtones. For example, the sound of the flute, the octave overtone is most prominent but not the higher overtones. On the clarinet the octave but mainly the 12th is prominent and etc. The human voice though has the most complex overtone series.”
Much of contemporary experimental music, especially experimental electronic music, is focused on the transformation of individual sonic elements. There’s something about the human voice that is so dense with tone, so complex, that it can overshadow everything around it. When the human voice is one of those elements subject to transformation, often the composition, the instrumental composition, becomes a background — becomes secondary — to the vocal. The exception, of course, is when the meaning of what is sung or spoken is itself ignored — or, more to the point, rendered secondary — in favor of tone and texture. And that is the sort of vocal music that ends up getting covered here.
In any case, this Voice on Record segment is a good introduction to early experiments in using tape delay and extended vocal techniques to transform the human voice.
Class distinctions and cultural assumptions aside, classical music isn’t foreign to hip-hop. Violins are a common emotional cue for producers, and enough hip-hop hits — from Coolio to Nas to the Beastie Boys, just to name a few — have sampled classical music to register it a common if not everyday occurrence. Hip-hop is often symphonic, built on over-sized emotions, dramatic syncopation, and room-filling sound. But DJ Rob Swift makes the connection literal on his forthcoming album, The Architect, due out February 23 on Ipecac (the record label run in part by Mike Patton, patron of noise and benefactor of sonic irritants). 
Above a deep chasm of sound, a tiny whir comes and goes. It’s like a surveillance drone flitting here and there, keeping its eye — and, more importantly, its ear — on the surroundings, and only making its own presence noticeable when it gets just too close. At which point it veers away. Then human speaking intrudes, monotonic, initially sounding like the chatter of multiple telephone voice-mail menus heard all at once. This is the echo chamber that is a call center, and eventually one voice emerges from that chamber — a woman’s, Indian. It’s just her side of the conversation, as she politely, and with some discomfort, attempts to get information out of her English-language interlocutor (
