14-15 February 2013, University of Technology,

PROGRAM

Under the auspices of:

With the support of:

ABSTRACTS

SESSION 1

Diane Hughes (Macquarie University, Sydney) – Imperfect Perfection: The Technological Processing of Vocal Artistry. This paper addresses technological processing of the contemporary singing voice in live and recorded contexts. While the acoustic instrument is embodied in a singer’s anatomy, physiology and biopsychology, the singing voice in popular culture is typically realised in formats that can be far removed from the singer. Technological applications facilitate the embodied instrument to be transformed into electrical signal that can then be manipulated and altered with creative and/or purposeful intent. Producers, engineers, equipment, software and treatments may significantly influence any resultant vocal aesthetic. By analysing the perspectives of singer and industry professionals, this research identifies the impact of technological processing on the grain (Barthes, 1978) of the singing voice. The ways in which the singers shape and identify their unique vocal sound is detailed, and the emergent influencers and influences on contemporary vocal artistry are discussed. In industries where pervasive technologies are applied to the singing voice, perfected vocal aesthetics are typical. Processing therefore has the potential to undermine and devalue the inherent artistry of the acoustic instrument while contemporaneously having the capability to facilitate creative and artistic intent. While technological processing essentially focuses on the ways in which the resultant vocal sound is conceptualised sonically, the dichotomy between creative or corrective processing intent reveals that conceptualisation is developed, maintained and mediated in a variety of contexts. These contexts, together with the prevalence of perfected recorded performance, provide distinct challenges for singers intent on maintaining artistic integrity.

Sarah Keith (Macquarie University, Sydney) – Perfect Star, Perfect Style: Vocal Production in J-pop. This paper examines the creative implications of technological processing of the voice with regard to normative modes of performance. Vocal production, in an acoustic context, is subject to a range of stylistic and timbral inflections by the vocalist. Once recorded, the voice can additionally be treated with multiple digital effects which change sonic aspects including loudness and frequency, pitch/contour, formants, temporal features, and so on. Substantial digital processing of the recorded voice results in an artefact which is effectively unperformable. This complicates conventional vocal aesthetics, where the skill of the performer is central. As a case study, this paper examines how the Japanese group Perfume, and the singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, operate as performers/artists whose voices are subject to considerable digital treatment. Perfume (2001-) is a three-member female electro-pop group with some success outside japan; Kyary Pamyu Pamyu (2011-) is a model and singer whose music videos have gathered considerable attention online. I aim to discuss how autotune, and other methods of digitally manipulating the pitch and timbre of the voice, are employed as a (technologically-aided) stylistic affectation, used with the intent of developing a performative persona. This paper also examines how extreme vocal processing implicitly questions the ability to perform live as necessary part of an artist’s skill. These distinctions between art and artifice, and performance and replication, are not static but are open to debate.

Yuji Sone (Macquarie University, Sydney) – Monstrous Voice: Japanese Virtual Diva, Hatsune Miku. This paper examines the singing performances of the Vocaloid 2 Hatsune Miku in Japan, commercially produced software that combines synthesised singing with an illustrated girl character as the singer. Users of this software create desktop song performances, and post them onto the Nico Nico Dōga, a popular video- sharing site in japan, like YouTube. Unlike YouTube, though, viewers can insert comments on the video clips they are viewing, creating a sense of ‘live’ participation. This creation and posting of videos of the singing Hatsune Miku immediately became an Internet sensation, resulting in a wide range of content derivatives in the form of illustrations, animation, games, and 3D figures. There have even been successful ‘live’ performances featuring the projection of an animated Hatsune Miku. The popularity of Hatsune Miku in Japan has been discussed as due to a complex matrix of social and cultural factors. Hatsune Miku has been especially popular with otaku (male nerd or geek) culture. The otaku fans of Hatsune Miku manipulate their virtual divas and consume each other’s creations. The Hatsune Miku phenomenon has also been criticised in relation to the Pygmalion myth. This paper discusses how Hatsune Miku performances create their effects through a complex interaction of voice, sound, image and words within the context of otaku culture. With reference to ‘the grain of the voice’ (Barthes) and the ‘abject’ (Kristeva), I aim to explain the affective force of Hatsune Miku’s voice performance across media platforms, as it exceeds the terms of current discussions in multimedia performance. It is simultaneously song and noise, semiotic and phenomenological, sexy and monstrous.

SESSION 2

Gregoria Manzin (The University of Melbourne) – Penelope's Voice: Unspinning Women's Stories. In her 2003 book For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression Adriana Cavarero observes how the pole of vocality has been traditionally read as standing in opposition to the pole of reason and the corresponding realm of philosophy. Cavarero links this initial observation to a critique of the patriarchal system which identifies the corporal and physical sphere with womanhood, and the rational sphere with manhood. In her analysis, Cavarero refers to Italo Calvino’s ‘A King Listens’ (from the collection Under the Jaguar Sun), thus effectively including literature in her discussion of how vocality and womanhood have been excluded from the dominant patriarchal discourse. Italo Calvino’s story is not an isolated incident: literature offers many examples in which female voices are portrayed as stemming from a marginal space. But moving from the classics (such as Ovid’s Heroides) to contemporary literature (Christa Wolf’s Medea and Dacia Maraini’s Voices, for instance), the notion of the female voice traverses a liminal phase where the margin becomes a space of resistance, and women’s discourse appears therefore as a political act in its Arendtian understanding. Cavarero herself authored an essay titled In Spite of Plato which seeks to redeem four women of the classic literary tradition from the marginal (and marginalised) space to which they had been condemned. By referring to the above-mentioned works by Cavarero, this paper first introduces the Italian philosopher’s views on vocality and womanhood. Secondly, it links Cavarero’s argument to literary works which have placed woman and voice at centre stage with the intention of rewriting the dominant patriarchal discourse.

Jim Macnamara (University of Technology, Sydney) – The Work, Politics and Architecture of Listening in Organisations: The Missing Links of Citizens’ Voices. Voice is widely recognised in democratic political theory, social theory, cultural studies and in more than 600 communication theories (Bryant & Miron 2004) as vital and integral to the functioning of society – indeed, as John Dewey said, society largely is communication (1916, p5). But, in much literature, voice continues to be perceived predominantly as speaking, either verbally or through texts. For voice to matter, as Couldry (2010) says it must, speakers and texts need to have listeners who give attention and recognition, engage in interpretation to try to understand, and ideally respond in some way (Bickford 1996; Honneth 2007; Husband 1996, 2000). While studies, such as those of Couldry (2009), Crawford (2009), Dreher (2009), O’Donnell (2009) and penman and Turnbull (2012) recently in relation to participatory democracy have recognised listening as part of voice that matters, studies of listening have rarely turned their attention to organisations. In institutionalised neoliberal democratic societies, citizens need to interact with an array governmental organisations, corporations and non-government organisations (NGOs) – and vice versa. But studies of election campaigns, online public consultation by government agencies, and organisational use of social media allegedly for ‘engagement’ show that organisations – public and private – rarely listen. Research reported in this paper illustrates that, while most organisations have a substantial ‘architecture for speaking’ and do considerable work to disseminate and amplify their voice, they do not do the work of listening or have an architecture of listening. The need for and composition of such work and architecture is outlined in this paper, based on research into organisational and political use of social media.

Jonathan Marshall (University of Technology, Sydney) – Giving Voice is not Enough: Routine Failures of Communication in Information Society. It often seems to be alleged that the information society gives voice to the repressed, and that giving voice enables a solution to political problems. However, voice does not equal understanding. In a trivial manner, if people begin speaking to each other then differences they have been able to ignore or gloss over come to the fore, and may be emphasised and lead to further difficulties, even the idea that they may have to annihilate each other. Communication is not always ‘good’ communication, and the inevitable hierarchies and power structures of society can further these difficulties and inaccuracies. Social categories, themselves while allowing particular groups to talk about each other also emphasise difference and difficulties and lead to stereotyping. Paradoxically we may have to emphasise difference in order to give voice, while at the same time risking that difference becoming more relevant and more painful. Failures of communication may also be easier when there is a large amount of information available, as that increases the tendency for social categories to become clichéd and abbreviated. This inherent confusion is explored both philosophically and through a theory of communication which attends to the disorder and mess found in daily life efforts at communication and giving voice.

SESSION3

Ansa Lønstrup (Aarhus University, Denmark) – Voice and Listening in the Artworks of Tony Oursler. The multimedial artworks of the American artist Tony Oursler are famous for their use of video-projected audiovisual and “animated” faces on sculptural forms. Tony Oursler has always been interested in voice, sound and music. He is inspired by and has studied under John Cage at the California Institute of Arts; he is originally a musician and has collaborated with Sonic Youth, and with sound artists as Tony Conrad and Stephen Vitiello; he has composed sound poetry and worked with various text and language models with the intention that the audience should enter into a dialogue with the sound in his works, staging an alternative to the “talking heads” on TV. In my paper I will make an analysis of some of his artworks, recently presented in a large Oursler exhibition (2012) at the art museum ARoS, Aarhus, Denmark. The analysis will be based on a phenomenological approach as presented by Don Ihde in his book Listening and Voice. Phenomenologies of Sound (2007). Encountering Tony Oursler’s installation works there appears to be an obvious point in the ambiguity of the word projection: the visual projection of moving images on the dynamic anti-screen forms (sculptures) are matched and doubled by the viewer-listener’s own mental (imaginary) projection of the (loudspeaker) sound onto the sculptural faces. In this way, through listening we create the circumstances for bringing life to the installation, which, because of this, is experienced as being alive and physically present despite being obviously staged and technologically mediated. So we experience momentarily the impossible, but possible in the imaginary meeting with another “living” being and its existence.

Hollis Taylor (University of Technology, Sydney) – The Chimeric Voice: A Meditation on Imitation. Vocal learning is rare. Aside from humans, evidence for it is confirmed only in songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds, as well as in marine mammals, bats, and elephants. Vocal learners typically imitate their own species and ultimately find their individual “voice”. Some go further. This paper concerns imitation, or mimicry, in nonhuman vocal learners-songbirds. This avian ability to reproduce sounds outside their own species, including environmental sounds, is poorly understood by biologists, and no single explanation appears to suffice. I present several audio/video clips as a way into our subject. These include chimeric episodes that resemble a DJ cut-and-paste session, where birds mimic a variety of avian and non-avian species, as well as a mobile ringtone and a car alarm. We also examine chimeric melodies, where a motif from an alien species is decontextualized and absorbed into a bird’s own phrase. The paper moves between the human and the nonhuman as it speculates on an understanding of mimicry in our mutual sound world. Musicians know mimicry by a myriad of names: imitation, borrowing, quotation, appropriation, bricolage, allusion, simulation, modeling, pastiche, parody, montage, and even plagiarism. Whatever the label, the mimetic powers of some songbirds betray their oral absorption of the exterior world and their facility as vocal learners. I contend that, as in language, mimicry is the underpinning of human music making. The chimeric voices of songbirds give us a window onto this shared capacity and interest.

Michael Farrell (The University of Melbourne) – Listen like Trees: The Neobaroque Voice in Dickinson, Neilson and Neidje. How might we conceive of the neobaroque voice in poetry? As a starting point, I adapt three definitional statements, two drawn from Latin American literary criticism and one from film criticism. These are 1) Severo Sarduy: ‘ the baroque language thrives in supplement, excess, and in the partial loss of its goal’; 2) Ernesto Livon-Grosman: ‘the way in which [in baroque texts] nature seems to extend or multiply itself in cultural products’; and 3) Angela Ndalianis: ‘baroque’s difference to classical systems lies in its refusal to respect the limits of the frame’. This excess and loss, natural-cultural extension and disrespect for the frame can be found in three poems that deal with voice and trees. Trees that ‘almost speak’ in Emily Dickinson’s ‘A Light Exists in Spring’; that listen in John Shaw Nielsen’s ‘The Orange Tree’; and, finally, in Bill Neidjie’s book-length Story About Feeling, where the wind and the grass (and ideally, humans also) listen, a tree makes a sound like breaking, but it may be a signal, a warning: ‘Might be somebody coming.’ (35) Ndalianis’s definition could be used to describe all voice as baroque in that voice must break out of the human frame to exist; voice in the poems mentioned above is ‘outside the frame’ in several senses: outside the poem, outside speech, and outside the culture-nature division. I read these poems as neobaroque in the postcolonial context of unsettlement.

PERFORMANCES DAY 1

Christiane Hommelsheim; Walli Hoefinger (Austria/Germany) – Birdsong A sound soars from me like a bird taking flight in the morning. It paints the walls and radiates beyond to all space my senses can perceive. The sound becomes movement in my body and colors the room like a bird’s song colors the sound of the morning. For many years we have engaged in the vocal research which is happening at the Roy Hart International Arts Centre in France and elsewhere, examining the roots of vocal expression from raw sounds to the traditional singing voice, both on our own and with our students. Together with Jonathan Hart-Makawaia we have created our new production Birdsong, which was co-produced with and presented at the Théâtre de la Vie, Brussels, in 2012. “The sounds that we make are always the audible manifestation of a ‘state of being’, a symptom of emotional and historical reality of the person. The state of being precedes the sound…” – Following this notion from Richard Armstrong we composed music from ‘vocal states’. A ‘vocal state’, in our terminology, is the color, expressivity and form that comes with a specific state of being of the person singing. The site of the voice is the body. The body in movement is a way of silent speaking, movement writes it’s silent music into physical space. We look for dialogue between physical space and music, so that the space can breathe, so that the minds and bodies in the space, including the audience, can breathe. Breath is the primal connection between physical and vocal space.

John D’Arcy (Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland) – Laganside: A Mobile Poetry Experience in Belfast Laganside: A Mobile Poetry Experience in Belfast is an application for iPhone and Android smartphones, released August 2012. The application is an interactive sound walk that situates poems along Belfast’s River Lagan. Users are led to key riverside locations that trigger voice with accompanying film, music and soundscape on their handset. The app encourages an exploration of Belfast’s rich poetic culture through its unique sonic presentation of poetry in the redeveloping areas of the city. Each poem is performed by its author and augmented with musical transformations of the voice and recordings of the Belfast soundscape. Some voices have been effected and transformed into abstract musical sound material in the spirit of electroacoustic composition. Accompanying field recordings follow the contours of speech rhythms, emphasising tempo and articulation. These are also manipulated with spectral processing in a surrealist approach to soundscape composition. Each poem is significant to a specific place along Belfast’s River Lagan. This creates strong a personal experience where sight and sound are enhanced through poetics. Oral narratives presented in the poems are given extra leverage by the listener’s surroundings in this novel approach to audio poetry. The performance proposed here is a 15 minutes documentary film that captures the on-site sonic poetry experiences on the Laganside smartphone app. The film also features interviews with Laganside’s poets, as well as thoughts from members of the public who have experienced the sounds of Laganside.

Amy Evans (King’s College, London, UK) – Poetry Reading [Abstract forthcoming]

Hollis Taylor (University of Technology, Sydney) – The Chimeric Voice: Songs of the Australian Pied Butcherbird. The vast diversity of ‘voices’ among nonhuman others reminds us that the possible design space in human music practice is greater than usually explored. It suggests that songbirds could offer new insights for us, reanimating the art and craft of music making as well as music analysis. This 20-minutes set for solo violin and field recordings (including the voices and other sonic constructs of birds, insects, humans, nonhuman mammals, and frogs) is based on the dynamic songs of the pied butcherbird. My (re)compositions do not seek to improve or develop birdsong so much as to illuminate and celebrate it. The violin part is often a direct transcription. Part songbird, part violinist – my chimeric voice in this concert concerns itself with the questions ‘Can the musicality of a pied butcherbird phrase survive transcription and reassignment to a voice or instrument of a different range, timbre, and facility?’ and ‘What might the music of nature have to tell us about the nature of music?’

SOUNDWALK Anthony Magen (Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology) Over the past eight years I have developed a concurrent practice of Soundwalking that traverses the boundaries of landscape architecture as sculpture, performance and acoustic ecology. This has manifest in a variety of modes from regular Soundwalks in across with Local government, festivals, conferences and educational institutions. As the current Secretary of the Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology (AFAE) I have a vested interest in the audible landscape in multifarious forms and am constantly striving to elucidate these perspectives in my practice. Soundwalks are a simple listening exercise enabled through walking with awareness without communicating, usually for a period of 1 hour or roughly 3km. They could be described as a form of landscape composition. They are a useful tool for blurring the performer/listener paradigm in any location thus empowering participants through reconnecting through movement and deep listening autonomously but within a small group.

SESSION 4

David Shirley (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) – Voice, Text and Presence in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett. Frequently described as a ‘theatre of presence’, Beckett’s drama can be interpreted, at one level, as an attempt to experiment with an assertion of ‘self’ – to proclaim the presence of an ‘I’ – in a world in which the body is frequently fragmented, denaturalised and often hidden. In many of the shorter plays, the strongest manifestation of presence is implied through the use of voice. Whether the voice is recorded and mechanical, as in Krapp’s Last Tape, or displaced and disconnected as in Not I, or weakened and in a state of decline as in Rockaby or Footfalls – the importance of the voice as the signifier of implied, imagined or real presence cannot be underestimated. In these plays, the voice acquires a very particular kind of potency – one that stretches beyond that of simple representation to suggest something much more intimate and intense – a kind of metaphor for different levels of presence and/or absence. By examining the interpretative demands and expectations that underpin the significance of vocal presence in some of the abovementioned texts, this paper will seek to highlight approaches to performance that are designed to release and empower a richly poetic, extremely dynamic and highly evocative relationship between the text, the performer, and the voice (live, amplified and/or recorded).

Malcolm Angelucci (University of Technology, Sydney) – ‘I Wrote Down the Voice’: Phonè and Poetry in Carmelo Bene. This paper addresses questions of inter-generic translation between theatre and poetry in the poem 'L Mal de' Fiori by Carmelo Bene. At the end of his life, ill and without the possibility to perform on stage, the Italian actor/director/writer/thinker Carmelo Bene (1937-2002) started writing what would become his last published work: a poem in which he claimed to have 'written down the voice'. My research discusses the issues linked with the translation between genres and media, reading Bene’s claim in the context of his seminal work on phonè and use of amplification technologies. It further analyses how poetry worked for Bene as a laboratory in which theoretical writing and artistic practices could find a point of coincidence.

Christine Piper (University of Technology, Sydney) – Memory of Trauma and the Unreliable Narrator in Fiction. This paper considers the role of memory as an unreliable narrator in my yet-to- be-published novel Undertow (written for my doctoral project) as well as Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table. All three texts have a male first-person narrator, whose journey through his memories gradually reveals a trauma with life-long ramifications. All three narrators are finally revealed as unreliable due to their biased views of events, the selective nature of their memories and the lingering emotional impact of the trauma they experienced. For Doctor Ibaraki, the narrator of Undertow, his internment in Australia during World War II initially seems to be the source of his nostalgic unease, but the real cause is eventually revealed to be his involvement in biological warfare testing in Japan. In The Remains of the Day, Steven’s loyalty to Lord Darlington blinds him to the immorality of his employer political manoeuvres, and Steven’s grief at the end of the novel indicates he realises his mistake. The boyhood memories of Mynah, the narrator of The Cat’s Table, aboard a ship are ultimately revealed to be inaccurate when the adult Mynah reunites with his cousin Emily, a key figure on the voyage. This paper investigates the intermingling of past and present and the layering of personal and public narratives in the aforementioned texts. It reveals the complex nature of memory and how it subverts narratives about the past.

SESSION 5

Eve Mayes (The ) – Student voice and the ‘inarticulate’ student: A Deleuzian/ Butlerian response to the judgment of voice. ‘Student voice’ has risen in prominence in educational discourses in the last twenty years. Frequently framed as a pedagogical movement that seeks to shift the “locus of authority” (Cook-Sather, 2002, p. 7) in school reform, many student voice initiatives draw on the critical pedagogy legacy of Freire (1970) to argue for their emancipatory potential (Taylor & Robinson, 2009). However, post- structural critiques of ‘voice’ (Alcoff, 1991; Ellsworth, 1989; Jackson & Mazzei, 2009) have implications for considerations of subjectivity and power/knowledge in student voice (Bragg, 2007; Whitty & Wisby, 2007).

This paper will consider representations of ‘inarticulate’ students’ voices in these initiatives. While student voice researchers/ practitioners desire to foster forms of student voice that are genuinely representative and inclusive, issues of how to include students who reject, resist or appropriate opportunities to participate in school decision-making have been raised (Bragg, 2001; Silva, 2001). I will briefly recount two of my own encounters with students that have shaken my own understandings of inclusion and student voice. In reflecting on the place and representation of ‘inarticulate’ students in student voice, this paper will then consider Butler’s (2005) discussion of Kafka’s short story The Judgment and Deleuze’s exploration (1998) of Artaud’s disorganisation of the voice in his radio play To have done with the judgment of God. While maintaining the radical potential of student voice, it will be argued that the multiplicity of possible responses to the invitation to ‘have a voice’ necessitates openness to student responses and resistance to attempts to pin down the outcomes of voice initiatives. Alcoff, L. (1991). The problem of speaking for others. Cultural critique, 20, 5-32. Bragg, S. (2001). Taking a joke: Learning from the voices we don't want to hear. Forum, 43(2), 70-73. Bragg, S. (2007). 'Student voice' and governmentality: The production of enterprising subjects? Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education, 28(3), 343-358. Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Cook-Sather, A. (2002). Authorising students' perspectives: Towards trust, dialogue and change in education. Educational researcher, 31(4), 3-14. Deleuze, G. (1998). Essays Critical and Clinical (D. W. Smith & M. A. Greco, Trans.). London: Verso. Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn't this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 59(3), 297-324. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York: Herder and Herder. Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (Eds.). (2009). Voice in qualitative inquiry: Challenging conventional, interpretive and critical conceptions in qualitative research. London: Routledge. Silva, E. (2001). Squeaky wheels and flat tires: A case study of students as reform participants Forum, 43(2), 95-99. Taylor, C., & Robinson, C. (2009). Student voice: Theorising power and participation. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 17(2), 161-175. Whitty, G., & Wisby, E. (2007). Whose voice? An exploration of the current policy interest in pupil involvement in school decision-making. International studies in sociology of education, 17(3), 303-319.

Andrew Moors (University of Technology, Sydney) – Metonymy, naming, schizophrenia I began this research as an attempt to use cognitive linguistics to theoretically inform my therapeutic practice as a nurse working with people with lived experience of mental health issues, including schizophrenia. Nursing theorists had noted from the 1950s that clinicians routinely referred to people in their care by a number of reductive terms, the ‘liver in bed 10, or the pneumonia in bed 15’ (Menzies Lyth 1959). This practice is metonymic, referring to something by a selected attribute, made salient by the context. It is a naming practice that renders the person absent. A key strategy in narrative therapy, externalising the problem, functions in part by reversing this process, separating the person from the reductive names that have been used about them, and which they may use themselves. Yet the narrative therapy literature, while including extensive discussion of metaphor, does not mention metonymy. Meanwhile, cognitive linguists frequently draw their examples of the operation of metonymy from health discourses, as they offer circumscribed language domains, with high value placed on economic language use. Investigating these areas, I came across an earlier, somewhat neglected literature. Early 20 century psychiatrists identified metonymic speech produced by many people with schizophrenia, noting that their patients would name things in different and unexpected ways. I am interviewing people who live with schizophrenia. I have adapted a method from oral history, first inviting the person to narrate their experience, then reinterviewing them, in part to check their views on my analysis of their talk about language. I will present some early results that reflect these intersecting theories.

Menzies Lyth, I. 1959, 'The functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety', in I. Menzies Lyth (ed.), Containing Anxiety in Institutions, vol. 1, Free Association Books, London, pp. 43-85.

Susan Pyke (The University of Melbourne) – Thin-Skinned Writers Hearing Voices: the productive opportunities of porosity and possibilities in other- than-human interruptions. I see merit in the argument that it is unethical to appropriate the voice of the unheard other. Yet it is also unfair for silence to be the only possibility for voices outside mainstream literary dialects. A partial solution might be to refuse the cult of the self which underlines these patterns of dominance. This is possible if that which is voiced in human articulations is partially constructed by the more- than-human. Voice is, after all, only loosely held within each person’s skin. It has a spatial and temporal elasticity that stretches back into vital specificities that include both familial relationships developed through time and also, equally importantly, specificities formed through the places in which these ancestral lines have been formed. This aspect of voice has elements of the ecolect described by James McKusick. Words develop in concert with country. It may be the voices I hear from my characters may make sense to me through the shared non-human articulations from the people and places that have entered the pores of my body. This idea of ecolects emerging through porosity aligns with Bracha Ettinger’s notion of the matrixial borderspace. In this context, taking on another’s voice may not involve mastery. The voice of the other is articulated through the non-contained self. Voicing out this partial self, heard through the affect of others, human and non-human alike, might be just what is needed to jam the workings of what Jacques Rancière calls the factory of the sensible.

SESSION 6

Jessica Wilkinson (RMIT University, Melbourne) – Voice, Music, Sound: Poetic Histories Beyond the Printed Word. The spoken word is always an event, a movement in time, completely lacking in the thing-like repose of the written or printed word. ---Walter Ong

I’m very very very wound up I sound…It’s also the visual look of the thing on the page. But most of all I would say it’s sound…I just take the chance that the sound of separate words is enough to make other connections or to make new connections or will force connections. --- Susan Howe

The name of Susan Howe has, over the last two decades, rapidly become a fierce presence on the contemporary poetry scene. Stimulating the reader’s senses with her visual and verbal play, her radical and difficult experimentalism marks a significant effort to explore and interrogate the margins of literary history. My interest in Susan Howe’s work shares the concern, articulated by Stephen Greenblatt, that ‘new literary histories’ poised to find a place for marginalised subjects ‘should do more than put them on the map; they should transform the act of mapmaking.’ My analysis of Howe’s poetry is guided by questions of how to produce these maps-these new forms of historical writing. More specifically, I am interested in the ways in which she utilises the poetic medium as a way towards a recovery of narratives that have been stifled by dominant narrative forms. This paper considers the ways in which Susan Howe’s vocal-acoustic collaborations with musician David Grubbs extend the dimensions of her poetic explorations of history and marginalised subjects. The collaboration between poet and musician for the albums Thiefth and Souls of the Labadie Tract has dramatically transformed and enriched the already complex texts of Thorow, Melville’s Marginalia and Souls of the Labadie Tract respectively, connecting them with sounds that powerfully interpret and extend the moods and ideas of the printed poems. My paper will discuss the various components of these recorded works, how they provoke different responses, from the listener, and the ways in which Howe continues to present a picture of the past/world that is multiple, shifting, and always developing. My aim is to explore sounds as a dimension available to the poet-historian for the production of a new kind of history.

Anne Pender (University of New England, US) – Voice and the Transformations of . Australian actor June Salter (1932-2001) is often remembered for the distinctive quality of her voice, which was deep, sonorous and ‘low cut’. Like many other actors, Salter began her career on the wireless during the ‘Golden Years’ of radio in the 1950’s. She trained with the well-known radio and film actress Miss Rosalind Kennerdale in the elegant living room-come studio of Kennerdale and her husband, actor and radio producer Lawrence H. Cecil. In Salter’s first professional role on Radio 2GB, she played opposite Alan White, recalled by Salter as ‘a Very Big Star, a gorgeous-looking creature, with a wonderful voice’. Salter’s voice as a singer and actor drew in audiences in a huge range of genres. Her career included stints on many radio serials, including the long-running Blue Hills. She moved into intimate revue at the in its earliest days and appeared alongside ‘matinee idol’ Max Oldaker and . From there she moved into television and , bringing her talent for intimate revue and vaudeville to the new medium. Salter appeared in Certain Women, a landmark ABC drama, in Learned Friends, as Eleanor Roosevelt in The Last Bastion, and as Queen Mary in the popular stage play Crown Matrimonial, as well as in many other plays, including a production of On Golden Pond with Ron Haddrick, with whom she had worked in radio forty years earlier. This paper investigates Salter’s voice and the extent to which it defined and determined her career on stage, radio and television. The paper will also examine the question of how the acting voice disguises the actor in the acting.

Tony Mitchell (University of Technology, Sydney) – Paolo Conte’s Voice. In his book Performing Rites (1998), Simon Frith indicated four ways in which the notion of ‘voice’ can be regarded in popular music studies: as a musical instrument, as a sign of the singer’s body, as an expression of the singer’s person, and as character in song narrative. This paper looks at the recorded output of Italian singer-songwriter Paolo Conte in the light of these four categories. Conte is the most internationally successful of the Italian cantautori who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, and also among the most idiosyncratic, eclectic and unusual exponents of what Franco Fabbri has defined as the canzone d’autore (author’s song). Nonetheless he remains a rather arcane, cult figure in the Anglophone world, combining apparent opposites – the provincial and the cosmopolitan – while appropriating a global sweep of influences without being definable as ‘world music’. Characteristics of both his rough, untrained singing style and wry, ironic and opaque compositions have strong affinities with US singer-songwriters like Tom Waits and Randy Newman, and he draws heavily on early US jazz influences, although he remains quintessentially Italian. This paper explores both how Conte has been received in the USA, and how his voice embodies ideas of orality, narratology and topography.

SESSION 7

Alessandro Mistorigo (Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy) – Reading Voices in Contemporary Poetry: Aspects and Perspectives My contribution focuses on voice in relation to contemporary poetic language. The voice of a poet who reads aloud his won composition puts back into play multiple relationships and similarities regarding the process of creating that specific text, as well as the very process of poetic creation. The physical voice has always been tied to poetry, where it often acts as a fracture between syntax and prosody, making evident the variations between the published and the vocal version. Through its vocal execution a text is always re-evoked in a different way within a specific time and space, as well as provided with a new relationship with the subject who is listening and understanding it. By working on Claudio Rodríguez and Manuel Vásquez Montalbán, as well as Andrea Zanzotto’s vocal rendition of some specific poems, I am focusing on the relationship between voice – as a body gesture and the expression of a particular subjectivity – and authorship. Considering new interdisciplinary approaches stimulated by the study of voice in the arts and humanities, it is crucial to rethinking concepts such as “subject” and “author” as well as “authorship” or ‘authority”. I will show the work already done through a prototypical digital archive which I am currently realising with Prof. Elide Pittarello at Ca’Foscari University, Venice.

Prithvi Varatharajan (University of Queensland) – Poetry, Subjectivity and the Voice: Lyrical Poetry on the Radio. This paper explores the vocal performance of lyrical poetry on the radio, as well as on other sound platforms such as poetry records and poetry podcasts. The paper is divided into three parts. The first establishes a definition of modern lyrical poetry, and examines the concept of lyrical poetry as an intense expression of human subjectivity, which is an idea that has been referred to by a diverse range of writers including Wordsworth and Adorno. The second looks at the importance of the voice to lyrical poetry, and lyrical poetry’s long tradition of vocal performance prior to the rise of literacy and print. The third looks at the mediation of the voice by modern technologies; ways that those technologies shape the voice; and how the technologised voice might heighten lyrical poetry’s effect on a listener. A concept that underpins this part of the paper is “secondary orality” described by Walter Ong as the mediation of oral utterances by technologies such as radio and television. My overarching argument is that the expression of subjectivity in a lyrical poem can be embodied by the spoken voice, and given full shape and weight when read aloud or performed to an audience. I argue in particular that the recorded and broadcast voice can intensify, and make present, subjectivities expressed in lyrical poetry. I take the ABC Radio National’s Poetica, a weekly program of poetry, as my case study when referring to the vocal performance of lyrical poetry on the radio.

Iben Have; Brigitte Stougaard Pedersen (Aarhus University, Denmark) – The Challenge of Voice in Literature: The Experience of the Printed Book Compared to the Digital Audio Book Experience. The paper wishes to discuss the role of the voice and its recent theoretical developments (Neumark, Cavarero, Van Leeuwen) in a theoretical framework that emphasises possible displacements in the understanding of the role of the voice from a literary experience of a printed book to the experience of a digital audiobook. In the inheritance from the French poststructuralist thinkers Derrida and Blanchot the voice of literature is silent and a specific literary experience. It positions itself as a reaction to or in opposition to the authenticity discourse of the physical voice, by Jacques Derrida termed phonocentrism. In Derrida’s reading, phonocentrism has resulted in a widespread conception in Western thought of the spoken voice as more authentic than the written. Thus the post- structuralist way of thinking wishes to turn its back definitively on the subjectivity and authenticity that cling to the spoken, bodily voice, and instead install the written, neutral voice of literature as a certain and privileged form of artistic and aesthetic experience, that turns its back on the author as well. In recent theory as well as in recent practices this notion of the embodied and disembodied voice seems challenged. A challenge that is underlined by the use of voice in various digital devices, for instance in the audiobook, which experiences an increasing popularity. In the experience of an audiobook all of the characteristics mentioned above of the literary voice are being questioned. When a physical, audible voice is reading the text aloud a number of stylistic choices are made concerning the text. The literary intonation is being shaped in the sense that a number of decisions are thoroughly considered or conducted; accentuations, intensity, tempo, phrasing and voice qualities are all part of the interpretative process which implies a possible standardisation. The paper wishes to discuss the role of the voice in the audiobook experience from two different perspectives: - The question of intentionality considering voice in relation to author, text and narrator. - The quality of the voice itself and its meaning creating potential, discussing the voice as a performed embodiment that is producing rather than representing the imagination of a voice in continuation of for instance Norie Neumark’s ideas.

PERFORMANCES DAY 2

Alice Hui-Shen Chang; Jessie Scott (The University of Melbourne) - Refract Refract addresses and exaggerates the inherent incongruity and contradiction of Alice Hui-Sheng Chang’s extreme, physical vocal performance, taking her established performance practice as its starting point. By using dual live video projections, and bending light through glasses, prisms and lenses, Jessie Scott magnifies and distorts the vibrations, strains and twitches of Alice’s face and vocal chords, through which the sound emerges. As the physical presence of sound is deconstructed live in front of the audience, the vulnerable yet influential organ is revealed, and the image of the voice is united with the body of the performer.

John D’Arcy (Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland) – Dynamic Neglect Dynamic Neglect is a radiophonic work that investigates the voices in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter. This area of the city has undergone drastic redevelopment over the past decade. Government bodies and corporations have repurposed buildings and re-branded this the ‘Cultural Quarter’ of Belfast. Several small venues, galleries and workshops act as the cultural backbone of this initiative, but an influx of restaurants, bars and hotels reveal the commercial aspirations of the city council. Heavy municipal investment has been made into these commercial outlets, which precede an organic growth of tourism and the arts within the area. Thus, there exists a great gulf between the luxurious bistros in St Annes square and he derelict units on North Street.

Dynamic Neglect documents the voices of Cathedral Quarter’s stakeholders at a key stage in its development: the opening of the Metropolitan Arts Centre (MAC), April 2012. A series of oral histories were collected from shop workers, business owners and residents, accumulating a diverse range of opinions about the past, present and future of Belfast. The divergent opinions about Cathedral Quarter are heard in Dynamic Neglect’s cut-up montage of voices, characters and sounds. Darting around the spaces and sounds of Cathedral Quarter, the piece constructs a narrative that focuses on the voices and histories of individuals. The piece offers multiple perspectives on the changing face of Belfast, revealing the problems faced when trying to maintain tradition while reaching towards a ‘shared’ post-conflict tourist-friendly future.

Michael Farrell (The University of Melbourne); Claire Nashar (The University of Sydney) – Poetry Reading: Motherlogue; The Children’s Story. I propose to read 2 long poems that employ a range of voices and that think about the representation of voice in poetry. My reading will be accompanied by a critical commentary by Claire Nashar.

This short paper will provide a critical commentary to accompany a reading by Michael Farrell of his poems “Motherlogue” and “the Children’s story”. Focusing principally on ‘Motherlogue”, the paper will appraise the function of Farrell’s problematisation of “voice” in his poetry, devoting particular attention to the tactics he employs to explore the poetic possibilities of what Denise Riley, in the tradition of Derrida, has called our “linguistic dispossession”. Of the freedom that this dispossession affords him, it will be argued that Farrell’s poetry produces more than mere heteroglossia, but a purposeful sense of the creolisation of different (and at times conflicting) Australian discourses.

Jessica Wilkinson (RMIT), Simon Charles and Manteia – Marionette: a Biography in Sound. This performance draws from the poetic-biography marionette, by Jessica L. Wilkinson (Vagabond, 2012), which playfully documents the life of early cinema actress Marion Davis (the lover of the media tycoon William Randolph Hearst). Marion’s silencing by the early cinema screen was strangely metaphoric for her being, in a sense, silenced by Hearst, who largely controlled her career and – as much as he could – her actions in public. Whilst there are countless biographies, both ‘factual’ and fictional, on William Randolph Hearst, there are very few accounts of Marion’s life. Indeed, in some of Hearst’s many biographies, she is barely mentioned despite being such a prominent figure in his life. For Wilkinson, Marion – as a woman who lived the prime of her life in the early 20th century on the Great White Way (itself an erasure machine) – is waiting to be spoken. Rachel Blau DuPlessis says in The Pink Guitar that these gaps in discourse cannot simply be ‘filled by a mechanism of reversal’, but must rather ‘pull into textuality… the elements of its almost effaced stories in all their residual, fragmentary quality’. Marionette, then, represents an attempt to pull together the stutters, fragments and strings of Marion’s story. In this performance, Wilkinson teams up with composer Simon Charles and ensemble Manteia to articulate the threads of this broken narrative while preserving its ever-elusive quality. This work was performed by invitation at the ANAM quartetthaus in Melbourne on October 22nd, 2012 to a restricted audience of 50.