Voice and Sonic Imagination
artistic practice-based research by Elif Gülin Soğuksu
In the sonic imagination, the act of listening internally and externally occurs simultaneously, as a polyphony—a synthesis of sounds imagined, expected, mimicked, remembered, and perceived. They are the instant moments of sonic hallucinations drifting in between real and imagined. Sounds vanish the moment they appear; their physical energy disperses and becomes inaudible, yet they linger and leave a trace in one’s mind as a form of memory or sensation—fugitive behavior of sounds makes it even harder to catch them in the realm of imagination. Though, the voice is always present in the mind. Ones coexist together; the act of listening externally finds responses and merges with the inner sounding, and the voice echoes, choruses, and contrasts with what is being listened to in the moment and perceived. One’s inner sonic world ventriloquistically speaks through the voice that permeates and mirrors the interior and exterior sonic realms. Could it be a fundamental core in the formation of the sounds of the mind? Voice is nowhere and everywhere, catching the sounds of the mind. I overhear voices everywhere, as in seeing faces in the configurations of clouds, rocks, and patterns. I search for voice-ness in the non-vocal sound sources; I hear them in the whistling of an airstream leaking through the pipe, sometimes in a machine humming. A moment of synthesis in between my imaginary state and perceptual attention, an auditory pareidolia.
Dear readers, whose means of musical creation at first starts in an immaterial manner and begins in their minds, How accurately could you listen to the imagined sounds or create them in the process of composition? How do you materialize them, through what means?
This project aims to explore voice as a potent that has a role in the formation of sonic imagination to be explored and employed for creative approaches to dealing with electronic music composition and algorithmic performances. By using the malleability, dynamic aspect, and rich spectral content of the vocal sound to control time-continuous and real-time sound synthesis parameters, the motivation is to
create a digital voice interface to explore the relationship between real-time synthesized sound and materialization of imagined sound in the process of electronic music composition. During the project, creative mapping approaches, analysis, and processing techniques over the vocal content have been investigated through implementations on Super Collider for live performances. Throughout the research, I have developed various algorithmic approaches for voice-driven live electronics and for processing vocal sounds. I have composed pieces, particularly interplaying with the idea of material ambiguity of the vocal. I explored a blurry, malleable sonic space that shifts back and forth in between flashbacks of sonic memories and traces of the vocal material that plays with the mode of listening and perceptual attention, alternating in between pure, distorted, and processed vocal materials.
My main motivation to hold this project was, as Marlene Schäfer states, technology suggests a sense of productiveness, as something that can be put in order to harness specific effects. Emphasizing the affordances of technology—what it does, rather than its essentiality—what it is—I wanted to weave a path on how technology can be considered as a potent that facilitates sound artists to go beyond their imagination and can be employed as a way to extend their internal imagination into the external sonic
reality in electronic music practices. During my Studio LOOS to production, making new connections, developing and maintaining my professional and artistic concepts, and sharing and exchanging music.
why working with voice?
Instead of raising questions about what voice is, what it symbolizes and represents, I lend my ears to the subjective affordances of voice beyond symbolic attributes; what it does, where it stands in my musical practice. Rather than privileging the vocal content, I explore its potential in the formation of imagined sounds for my compositional practice. Throughout the research, I realized that the perpetual presence of my inner voice infects and influences the way I compose, the way I listen and the way I make meanings of the world. It mirrors and permeates the interior and exterior sonic realms. It stands as a trace, sonic catcher in the terrains of imagination.
About the performance/piece
The performance is based on live-coding experiments that process, synthesize, and spatialize sounds using algorithmic techniques. The reason why algorithmic approaches have been used in this performance was to expand the creativity and imaginative aspects in the compositional process through different means and tools. In this performance, I explored different ways and tools to materialize the sounds of the mind, not only through pure imagination but also through programmatic and algorithmic means of sound making. The initial idea was to find creative mapping techniques from vocal analysis and turn them into a data set to be used in processing and synthesizing sounds. Ethereal voices and harmonies, field recordings, synthetic and micro sounds—electronic clicks, impulses, and discrete sounds—move across the surfaces and collide with the space's texture, density, and sparsity. A blurry, malleable sonic space that shifts back and forth in between flashbacks of sonic memories and traces of the vocal material that plays with the mode of listening and perceptual attention, alternating in between pure, distorted, and processed vocal materials. Voices draw others into their fold, allowing the affective impact to become one in different bodies, resonate with one’s skin and bones, and tickle one’s ears.
Some compositional ideas behind of the performance
Leaving enough sonic space, silent moments for the audience to evoke their own imagination on the music.
Synthesized sounds based on vocal material analysis to produce electronic sounds following the behavior of vocal envelope and frequency content.
Bringing repetition and continuation of the same sound materials: introducing them to the listeners over and over until they go under abstraction and are no longer recognizable for them.
Creating a sense of hypnotic effect within each repetition and expand the layers of the vocal harmony, as if the listener dives into the spell of the vocal and the realm of daydreaming under the influence of its sonic soothingness and repetitiveness —almost like a lullaby.
research questions
The research looks at catching the sounds of the mind. I explore voice as a potential that has a role in the formation of sonic imagination to be employed for dealing with electronic music composition and algorithmic performances.
How accurately could one listen to the imagined sounds or create them mentally in the process of composing? How are they materialized, and through what means?
Where does the voice stand in the formation of the imagined sound?
How does this presence of inner voice influence the way musical sounds are auralized and composed?
research diaries
#1 Perpetually, whenever I begin the process of composition, I carry an excitement of inexpressible musical ideas within me. I go through a feeling of compulsion. I fidget around with an urge to compose the imagined sounds so that I don’t forget about them. I inhabit a level of stress, a restlessness. How can I translate them before they evaporate from my mind?
#2 I often find myself improvising over a piece of music, with or without using my voice, sometimes only in my head where moments of overhearing occur or sonic hallucinations, but not as hearing one thing as something else but as a matter of “doubled sound” as Don Ihde describes it.
#3 The experience of sonic imagination can be polyphonic, the inner voice is always present. We co-exist together, I open my mouth and release the sounds that linger in my head, those sounds wander across the pool of my imagination.
#4 As I’m perpetually aware of the presence of my voice in my inner sounding in which the voice is anchored. Vocalizations, inner and outer, give a tangible form to the imagined ones, the voice decodes through its own lexicon.
conclusion
I would like to thank Studio LOOS, Peter van Bergen for facilitating the artistic research and evening of live performances, and also to the Municipality of the Hague for supporting us. To Liza Kuzyakova for collaborating with me on this event, to Adomas Palekas, Aisha Paignes, and to everyone who came to the event and supported us.