Inspired by Stockhausen’s ‘Gesang der Jünglinge’ which was introduced to me in one of Gareth’s classes, I explored some tape manipulation techniques; pitching, driving, encoding with NR enabled and playing back with NR disabled. These techniques really helped me warp the sounds of my own voice, and I was surprised at how authentic the results sounded.

This was an exciting first experiment, and I pursued the idea further over the next few days, using my Tascam 414. Bouncing from computer to tape, altering and then bouncing back during another pass.

I felt like I was approaching a sonic fingerprint that I felt echoed my feelings well. The destruction of my voice was interesting and very transformative. I felt like I wanted to say more meaningful things in each recording, though. The test recordings were speaking nonsensical sentences, endless waffling with long filler words describing superlative actions. I began to think about if an alternative was needed.

My initial idea was to slowly degrade my recordings by passing them along a very long tape loop, running through three separate cassette players. Each cassette player would be a different output coming into my DAW, and combining both the varying playback qualities with different processing on each channel, I will have a long triple delay with each repeat being more distorted than the last, with the tape finally returning into the ‘recording’ player and being wiped with new audio. This sounded good in my minds ear, and I had the tape players necessary. I didn’t have enough tape shells so I quickly ordered some in.

Upon the shells arriving I suddenly felt that I would be going to a lot of effort to precariously create this long tape loop around a room passing through three discrete players, but the physicality of the process would be lost on the listener. The audio would be distinctly analogue sounding, but I felt that half of the power in this piece was in the unstable layout of tape machines visualising the audio progression in real time. For this reason, I decided that this technique would best be lent to an exhibition-style piece as my flat is very small with not much space to work with.

For this reason I decided to keep digital for this project. Some analogue might find its way into the signal chain, but not as a central focus.

I’ve decided to focus on the self, with regards to how the self revolves around interactions with other people, and how we can potentially define ourselves using external activities. For example; one might associate with the idea of being a party animal, or a live performer, or being very vocal and outspoken when in social settings. During a pandemic these external forces are brought to a screeching halt, and ones sense of self may be altered by that. Social skills that were once well lubricated fall by the wayside and become rusty after a year of hardcore neglect, and the activities that once defined us have become impossible to experience.

How does my own voice sound to others? How do they remember me, on whose mind is my voice imprinted, my verbal mannerisms? These are questions that I would like to hold in my mind while working on my audio for this sound piece.

I enjoy talking, I enjoy explaining and reveling in lavish feats of linguistic extension and I feel that this is at the core of my being. I take plenty of inspiration from the works of P.G Wodehouse, and greatly admire his impressive handle on the English language – something that I aspire to be known for.

But, how can I illustrate my social sense of self within sound? How can I illustrate that my words and spoken voice is something that I desire to reconnect with, something that I feel I am missing out on?

Out of the choice between people or places, (with regards to the subject matter of my individual composition) I pondered, for a moment, and then felt wholly and completely drawn to people. To voices, perhaps, and to how distinct and unique each voice appears. We get to know certain voices very well and can easily identify them, even when those individuals are attempting to mask their voice, from a very early age.

This seemed curious to me, an evolutionary sensitivity to the vocal range of audio, our ability to detect the slightest change within that band; so I decided to probe the matter some more. I soon came upon the idea of memory; the memory of voices, and then came the realisation that memory is an imperfect medium of recording. When you are reconnecting with someone they might not be exactly how you remember, because your memories can degrade and alter over time, sometimes leading to the formation of completely new (false) memories, or of distorted half-truths. I wanted to illustrate this disconnect between memory and reality, with recordings of my own voice or those of people around me with whom I am familiar.

Morphing these sounds over time would allow me to mask some features and accentuate others, smearing and smudging until the final voice recordings are unrecognisable or alien when compared to the source audio. This seemed a good thread to tug at, so it stuck around.

// made from writings on paper from roughly 3 weeks ago //