Abstract
Voice is a social object. It bounds humans together, by circulating and shaping social relations. Recordings and sound technology allow audio to travel through places and times. A recorded spoken voice can encounter an audience far from its place of emission. Human interaction with voice is both a cognitive phenomenon and an emotional, vibrational, carnal experience. The former has been mainly studied through the prism of speech perception, while the latter is understudied by scholars. The experience is entangled with the sonorous dimension of voice. We focus on the listener. We experiment with new aesthetics of listening to recorded spoken voice, with a concern for transmission, circulation, and revitalization of our oral heritage. We follow academics’ recent interest in the social and political potentialities of emerging sound-based practices, informed by the sensible and the unseen. We displace voice from its original activity and context, and we perform it in a collective listening session, tuned to the audience. What is at work is a multidirectional, emotional transfer of words and vibrations, in proportion to the sonic sensitivity and commitment of the listener. At collective level, from the common experience seems to emerge an elusive community, focused on the simple but resourceful ability to listen to human expression. This is an attempt to drill new channels of meaning and agency in the apparently trivial action of listening to voice. It opens vivid possibilities for the ongoing digitization of oral corpora. It intensifies and broadens social imaginary in a more inclusive, relational way.
Presenters
Laetitia KozlovaStudent, Ph.D Candidate, Research Center for Science and Technology of the Arts, Porto, Portugal
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2023 Special Focus—-New Aesthetic Expressions: The Social Role of Art
KEYWORDS
Voice, Listening, Collective, Social engagement
