HYPERVOCALITY: VOICE, TIMBRE, AND EMBODIMENT IN THE DIGITAL AGE By JAMES ANDREW BABCOCK A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2017 1 © 2017 James Andrew Babcock 2 To my Mom 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first and foremost like to thank my chair Paul Koonce for his dedication and investment in my growth as a composer, scholar, teacher and overall person. Dr. Koonce’s guidance has significantly boosted my creativity and scholarship in unexpected ways, giving me many tools to draw from in the future. Thank you to Paul Richards for instilling confidence in my work and giving me the freedom to find my own compositional voice. Thanks to James Paul Sain, whose teaching, friendliness, humor, and overall guidance made my doctoral degree easier to navigate and helped me learn many things about myself. Thank you to Jennifer Thomas, whose passion for meticulous research and writing has helped guide my dissertation project every step of the way. Thanks to Jack Stenner for opening me up to many new ways of making and conceptualizing art. Also, I would like to thank my previous composition teachers––Cort Lippe, Sam Pellman, Jeffery Stadelman––your wisdom continues to crop up unexpectedly and help guide my decisions both in and out of music. I would also like to thank all of my UF peers who accompanied me along the way, particularly Travis Garrison, Adam Scott Neal, Benjamin O’Brien, Sean Peuquet, Michael Polo, Thomas Royal, Rob Seaback, Michael Smith, and Chet Udell. Your friendship and unique perspectives have made my time at UF most enjoyable and rewarding. In addition, I would like to thank the Stewart, Brown, Williams, and Horner families for all their support through the years and encouraging me to do what I love. Specifically, thank you to Miski Horner for sticking with me through this entire process of strict routine, bodily injury, and philosophical babble––your patience and warm spirit I am forever grateful for. Finally, I would like to thank my mother, whose unconditional love, thoughtfulness, kindness, and ability to listen are qualities I will always aspire to. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................... 4 LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................................. 7 LIST OF OBJECTS ............................................................................................................. 8 ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................... 9 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 11 2 THE PARADOX OF VOICE ........................................................................................ 13 Defining Voice ............................................................................................................. 13 Myths of Voice............................................................................................................. 15 Technological Ventriloquisms and Virtual Effects ...................................................... 19 Voice and Musical Persona ........................................................................................ 21 Linguistics of the Voice ............................................................................................... 23 Nonsense and Beyond Singing .................................................................................. 27 Vocality ........................................................................................................................ 32 Artificial Vocality .......................................................................................................... 37 3 THE LISTENING VOICE ............................................................................................ 41 Mimesis, Mimicry, Imitation ........................................................................................ 41 Ecological Perception and Embodied Music Cognition ............................................. 43 Metaphor and Vocal Embodiment .............................................................................. 47 Motor-Mimetic Participation ........................................................................................ 49 Subvocalization and Timbre Appraisal ....................................................................... 53 Expression, Exertion, Emotion ................................................................................... 59 Mishearing and Vocal Reflexivity ............................................................................... 71 Cross-Modal Vocality .................................................................................................. 74 Hyperproximity and Oral Entanglements ................................................................... 77 4 TOWARD A THEORY OF HYPERVOCALITY .......................................................... 86 Dissolution of Voice and Re-enchantment ................................................................. 86 Attention, Distraction, Counterpoint............................................................................ 90 Spatial Counterpoint in Walkabout ............................................................................. 94 Holistic and Biomorphic Space ................................................................................... 98 Biomorphic Voice-Bodies in Red Snow....................................................................101 A Theory of Hypervocality ........................................................................................105 5 5 REVEALING VOCAL ENTANGLEMENTS: CONSTRUCTING THE HYPERVOCAL..........................................................................................................107 Reconstruction: Voices Through Mimetic Reciprocity .............................................109 Vocal Silhouettes: Short of Touch and Chatterbox ..................................................114 Ventriloquy: Composer as Ventriloquist and Listener as Dummy, or Listener as Ventriloquist and Composer as Dummy? .............................................................118 Unveiling the Voices ...........................................................................................121 The Ventriloquial Reply ......................................................................................125 Final Remarks ...........................................................................................................127 LIST OF REFERENCES .................................................................................................130 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ..............................................................................................147 6 LIST OF FIGURES Figure page 3-1 Sonogram and waveform of Skrillex’s Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, 0:41– 0:51. ........................................................................................................................ 66 3-2 Sonogram and waveform of Merzbow’s Uzumushi, 0:00–2:40. .............................. 68 3-3 Roughness in Merzbow’s Uzumushi, 1:51–1:53 ...................................................... 69 3-4 Kiki and Bouba (adapted from Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001) ...................... 77 3-5 Sonogram of glissandi and roughness in Autechre’s M39 Diffain, 4:10–4:13. ....... 81 4-1 Sonogram of high-friction, hyperproximate voice in Walkabout, 2:08–2:13. ........... 96 4-2 Roberto Matta, Elle Loge La Folie (1970), biomorphic painting (image taken from http://www.matta-art.com/1970.htm). ..........................................................100 4-3 Sonogram of wide voice-body containing low formants in Red Snow 2:29–2:45. 103 5-1 Sonogram of cartoon-like voice glissando in Reconstruction, 3:16–3:19. ............114 5-2 Image of Rubin vase (image taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Rubin2.jpg). ...................................................................................................115 5-3 Sonogram of barking piano interjection in Chatterbox, 2:04–2:05. .......................117 5-4 Sonogram of rapid prosody in Short of Touch, 1:29–1:33. ....................................118 7 LIST OF OBJECTS Object page 5-1 Reconstruction: electroacoustic composition soundfile (.wav file 117MB) .........110 5-2 Short of Touch: electroacoustic composition soundfile (.wav file 97MB) ...........114 5-3 Chatterbox: electroacoustic composition soundfile (.wav file 36MB)..................115 5-4 Ventriloquy: electroacoustic composition soundfile (.wav file 156MB) ...............119 8 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy HYPERVOCALITY: VOICE, TIMBRE, AND EMBODIMENT IN THE DIGITAL AGE By James Andrew Babcock May 2017 Chair: Paul C. Koonce Major: Music The voice plays a crucial, performative role in understanding timbre and navigating musical experience. As a mediator of desire, empathy, affect, exertion, and cross-modal perception, our voice allows us to imagine what it is like to be something else, opening an intersubjective dialog between our body and the objects we entangle ourselves with. As a consequence of our