The Sculpted Voice

an exploration of voice in sound art

Author: Olivia Louvel

Institution: Digital Music and Sound Art. University of Brighton, U.K.
Supervised by Dr Kersten Glandien
2019.
Table of Contents
1- The plastic dimension of voice ................................................................................... 2
2- The spatialisation of voice.......................................................................................... 5
3- The extended voice in performing art ........................................................................16
4- Reclaiming the voice ................................................................................................20
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................22
List of audio-visual materials ............................................................................................26
List of works ....................................................................................................................27
List of figures...................................................................................................................28

Cover image: Barbara Hepworth, Pierced Form, 1931.

Photographer Paul Laib ©Witt Library Courtauld Institute of Art London.

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 1- The plastic dimension of voice

My practice is built upon a long-standing exploration of the voice, sung and spoken and its
manipulation through digital technology. My interest lies in sculpting vocal sounds as a
compositional method with the use of digital carving tools. From my voice I generated audio
material, which could not be associated with its origin. In 1976, Joan La Barbara, renown for
her exploration of extended vocal techniques defined the voice as “the original instrument”. 1
Voice has a special status. Composer Trevor Wishart underlines the fact that “the human voice
is not just another musical instrument” but a “unique and intrinsically multimedia source of
sound events”, formed of a variety of expressions “animal expression (laugh, scream, cry)”,
range, personality, language and song.2

The 20th - and 21st - century technological progress made voice manipulation possible. The
accessibility of reproduction - the tape recorder – has allowed the voice to be ‘printed’, thus
becoming a tangible material with a second life.
We can correlate the emancipation of recorded voice with the emancipation of sounds under
the electroacoustic research led by Pierre Schaeffer first at ‘Club d’Essai’ then at GRM3. With
musique concrète, sound - and therefore voice - became a malleable, sculptable material: a
sound material whose identity could now be technically manipulated, looped and obscured.
In 1951, Schaeffer organised the first musique concrète workshop attended by Pierre Boulez,
as well as French composer and musicologist Monique Rollin.4 The following year
Rollin delivered with Étude vocale [Motet] (1952)5 a surprising short recording of multiple
pitched and spliced voices, a naive analogue emulation of what is now achievable with digital
effects available such as Beat Repeat6 in Ableton7.

1D. Krcatovich, ‘Joan La Barbara Voice is the Original Instrument’, The Quietus, 29 April 2016,
http://thequietus.com/articles/20126-joan-la-barbara-voice-is-the-original-instrument-review, (accessed 30 April 2018).
2 T. Wishart, ‘The function of text in the VOX Cycle’, Contemporary Music Review, 5:1, 1989, p.190.
3 GRM, Groupe de Recherches Musicales, Paris, France. 1951.
4 M. Battier, ‘What the GRM brought to music: from musique concrete to acousmatic music’, Organised Sounds, vol.12,

No.3, 2007, Cambridge University Press, p.194.

5 ‘L’art de l’étude, Archives GRM Various artists’, https://electrocd.com/en/album/2498/Various_artists/Archives_GRM,

(accessed 09 October 2018).

6 ‘Guide to Beat Repeat from Quantize Courses’, https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/guide-beat-repeat-quantize-courses/,

(accessed 12 October 2018).

7 software music sequencer and digital audio workstation.

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In the second half of the 20th century, visual artists took an interest in exploring sound. With
art and sound colliding, methods and terminology inevitably merged between the two
disciplines.
With the digital revolution, new ‘sculpting’ tools emerged such as IRCAM’ s AudioSculpt8 and
the open source SPEAR 9. AudioSculpt’s name itself comes from the idea of sculpting the sound
directly on its graphical representation. Sounds are sculpted with filters: a spectral
transformation occurs. Granular Synthesis10 available for instance through the app
Borderlands11 allows an ever-evolving matter to be shaped. In Pro Tools12, the function ‘elastic
properties’ allows the sound material to be stretched and compressed. These softwares have
been greatly contributing to expand the plastic dimension of sound thus, voice.

In the 1980s, Trevor Wishart demonstrated his extensive research on sculpting the voice with
his notable work VOX cycle (1980-1988). Wishart states that the voice is “more flexible in its
sonic capabilities that any contrived instrument”.13 Around the same time, electronic music
pioneer Laurie Anderson was experimenting with filters, sculpting her voice to speak in a
masculine register, ‘The Voice of Authority’14, thus operating one of the first notable gender
manipulations on recordings. 1978 marked the launch of Anderson’s new sculpted voice at The
Nova Convention.15

From pitch to texture sculpting, the new millennium saw the release of the astonishing LP
record by Norwegian composer and performer Maja Ratkje16, Voice (2002), a combination of
extended vocal techniques and sculptural sound treatments. In Voice, the material is carved,
torn, stretched and expanded.

8 cf. AudioSculpt, IRCAM, http://anasynth.ircam.fr/home/english/software/audiosculpt, (accessed 30th April 2018).

9 cf. SPEAR, Sinusoidal Partial Editing Analysis and Resynthesis, M. Klingbeil, http://www.klingbeil.com/spear, (accessed 4rth
May 2018).
10 sounds are broken into tiny grains which are then redistributed and reorganised to form other sounds.
11 cf. Borderlands http://www.borderlands-granular.com/app/, (accessed 15 November 2018).
12 digital audio workstation developed and released by Avid Technology.
13 Wishart, op. cit., p.190.
14 J. Caux, ‘Laurie Anderson brings out her violins’, Art Press, vol. 285, December 2002, p.29.
15 R. Barry, ‘Critical Stargazing: An Interview with Laurie Anderson’, The Quietus, 3 August

2010, http://thequietus.com/articles/04742-laurie-anderson-interview, (accessed 18 July 2018).

16 cf. M. Ratkje, http://ratkje.no, (accessed 3 July 2018).

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More recently, electronic artist Holly Herndon whose research also lies in voice manipulation
stated:
I construct patches to augment and transform aspects of the voice in an attempt to
uncover new perspectives and identities from a familiar source. I play a lot with gender
on that record, it is incredibly liberating to be able to manipulate my voice to be two
octaves deeper, to sound like a car crash or a rhythm section. 17

There is indeed in Herndon’s practice an analogy between sculpting a material - a stone - and
sculpting the voice.

The composers mentioned above have all explored and challenged the plastic dimension of
voice through the medium of recording. Author and curator Kersten Glandien states that
“artists understood sound as ‘matter’ and sought to mould sound, by giving it a sculptural
structure”.18
French sonic researcher and ‘Voice Sculptor’ Gilles Azzaro has been driven by giving sound a
sculptural structure. Investigating the invisibility of sound and its materialisation, Azzaro
operates a literal plastic conversion of voice into sculpture with Barack Obama: The Next
Industrial Revolution (2013), a spectrogram of Obama’ s voice print expanded into a five-foot
sculpture.19

Figure 1 Gilles Azzaro: Barack Obama: The Next Industrial Revolution, 2013.

17 C. Moss, ‘Continuous Partial Listening: Holly Herndon in conversation’, Rhizome, 22 January 2018,
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/jan/22/holly-herndon/, (accessed 27 April 2018).
18 K. Glandien, ‘Art on Air: a profile of new radio art’ in Music, Electronic Media and Culture, ed. S. Emmerson, Ashgate,

Aldershot a.o., 2000, p.172.

19 cf. G. Azzaro, http://www.gillesazzaro.com/pages/fr/bio.htm, (accessed 17 May 2018).

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 2- The spatialisation of voice

From the two-dimensional medium of recording, the voice has since expanded to a three-
dimensional spatialisation - a surround environment - as well as being hosted within sound
sculptures in large-scale installations. The earliest sound sculptures appear in the 1950s:
French inventors François and Bernard Baschet pioneered a new way of combining sound
and sculpture resulting in a large collection of original instruments - Les Sculptures Sonores
(1952).20

As we examine the interplay between voice and sculpture in installation art, we can perhaps
expand the terminology of ‘sound sculpture’ to ‘voice sculpture’ when dealing only with voices
as the main audio source. The need to differentiate can be justified because as mentioned
before, voice has a ‘special status’, set apart from the other instruments as an outsider in the
sound world.
Sound artists Janet Cardiff, Susan Philipsz and Laurie Anderson are linked by a common feature:
their background in the expanded field of sculpture and their extensive work with voice in the
field of sound art.

Envisaged as a sculptural piece, Cardiff’s installation The Forty Part Motet (2001) is consisting
of forty loudspeakers arranged in a circular configuration, playing back a recording of Spem in
Alium (1573) by Thomas Tallis. First created in 2001, the piece has since been reinstalled many
times across the world.

20 cf. François Baschet, http://francois.baschet.free.fr/, (accessed 16 July 2018).

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Figure 2 Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet, MoMA NYC, 2001.

The loudspeakers are assembled in eight groups and each of these groups are formed of five
voices: bass, baritone, alto, tenor and soprano. Each speaker corresponds to a singer. The
surround audio set-up allows us to be within the choir, avoiding the traditional frontal position
of a live performance. Cardiff emphasises the fact that “our ears are designed for multi-
dimensional sound and not stereo/mono”.21 Her intention was to be able “to climb inside the
music, be in it”. 22
Cardiff worked particularly on shifting the position of sound to another so that we - the
experiencers- understand that we can walk around the speakers. By getting closer to a speaker
we can isolate a voice and feel the fragility of the performance. The moving listeners can create
their own mix whilst positioning their bodies in the space. Cardiff states that “people are
making sculptures as they walk around”.23 Sound art pioneer Bernhard Leitner articulates this
notion in his pioneering research as the way we sonically influence the space with our own

21 ‘Janet Cardiff’, [online video], 2017, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/videos/tateshots/janet-cardiff, (accessed 29 March 2018)

22 ‘[FLVMoMA] Janet Cardiff on her work The Forty Part Motet’, [online video], 2017,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ5xgKVZNmA, (accessed 29 March 2018).
23 ibid. 2017.

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body from our movement and position. Leitner underlines the importance of understanding
the body as an autonomous acoustic instrument, “an integral acoustic sensorium”, that is “the
hollow spaces of the body, the bones, the way the sound is transmitted in the body, how it
passes through the skin, and how it is transmitted on.” 24
Sculpture is the art of making three-dimensional forms, representative or abstract, using
shaping techniques. Here, an abstract form is shaped from the techniques of sound diffusion
and from the impact of the corporeality of the audience, resulting in a three-dimensional
sculptural material. Or as Leitner puts it, a “sound-space” object defined by traveling line of
sounds.25
Janet Cardiff tells us that she is “sculpting the voice”.26 In 1968, Bernhard Leitner defined
“sound as an architectural and sculptural material”.27 This applies to voice too: a sculptural
material in space defined by traveling lines of sounds amplified by loudspeakers, a space of
sculpted voices, a ‘voice-space’.

Examining further the organisation of the voices, it appears that the surround set-up is not
determined by the type of voices each singer holds in a classical choir. In each group of
loudspeakers, we have five voices next to each other: bass, baritone, alto, tenor and soprano.
This would appear difficult in a traditional choral set up as each tessitura28 is purposely
grouped together to facilitate the singer’s performance. In The Forty Part Motet, we have a
decomposed choir. Cardiff has taken apart the choir in space and as such the surround set-up
reveals at times a complete shift of sound to one side of the room. This abrupt panning of the
sound occurs because the choir is not performing as a unit in front of us since it has been
displaced and reorganised in an oval configuration. Cardiff with the speakers supplanting the
singers can take these liberties. The 20th century technological expansion has given us the
ability to dislocate sounds in time as well as in space to create virtual spaces. This is the
phenomenon of ‘schizophonia’ a term coined by Raymond Murray Shafer. Murray Shafer

24 B. Leitner, ‘Sound Cube, Bernhard Leitner interviewed by Wolfgang Pehnt’ in Sound: Space. Cantz, Ostfildern, 1998, p.92.
25 ibid., p.161.
26 ‘[FLVMoMA] Janet Cardiff on her work The Forty Part Motet’, [online video], 2017,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ5xgKVZNmA, (accessed 29 March 2018).

27 ‘Lunch with Bernhard Leitner’, [online video], 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzYyuBBHMyA, (accessed 21

April 2018).
28 a vocal range for a given singer.

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states that “we have split the sound from the maker of the sound. Sounds have been torn from
their natural sockets and given an amplified and independent existence.”29

I experienced The Forty Part Motet at Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2018 for Being Modern:
MoMA in Paris30. Cardiff’s work had a strong impact on me. Once the composition had been
diffused, we could distinguish in the recording the post-performance environment: children
talking, a singer coughing, others getting ready to perform…This soundscape subtly blended
with the sounds generated by the audience’s own footsteps and small talks. In fact, once the
music ended, the audience wondered if the piece was over or not, but it was not since the
playback was continuing - the recording had not been stopped. Then another cycle of the
Thomas Tallis piece began.
Janet Cardiff felt that an intermission was necessary as it made “the people into real people”.31
This intermission humanises the acousmatic voices - the speakers themselves - with the aim of
making the singers’ presence alive in the room. First the humans were removed, then the
technology was humanised.

29 R. Murray Shafer, ‘The Music of the Environment’ in Audio culture: readings in modern music, eds. C. Cox & D. Warner,
Continuum, New York and London, 2004, p.34.
30 Being Modern: MoMA in Paris, https://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/en/exhibitions/exhibition/being-modern-moma-in-

paris.html, (accessed 15 November 2018).

31‘One Collective Breath: Janet Cardiff's The Forty Part Motet’, [online video], 2015,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZXBia5kuqY, (accessed 29 March 2018).

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In Lowlands (2010), Susan Philipsz’s voice is recorded and diffused through loudspeakers,
which we cannot see: an acousmatic voice “in search of an origin, a body”32.
Philipsz states that her songs are “sound sculptures”. 33 34 It is the discipline of sculpture which
informs her work in sound, combined with the exploration of her own voice as a material.
Philipsz’s voice remains untrained as she leaves in breaths and imperfections purposely to
maintain its fragility.
In Lowlands, a recording of Philipsz singing a 16th century lament is diffused over a series of
bridges over the Clyde in Glasgow. Philipsz discovered that there were three different versions
of this Scottish sailor lament so she recorded the three versions and had them play
simultaneously under each of the three bridges.

How can a 16th century song be a “sound sculpture”? Susan Philipsz’s approach is not about
sculpting the voice in a surround configuration as seen in Janet Cardiff’s installation. Neither is
she experimenting with the plastic dimension of voice as she has chosen to maintain it as
natural as possible, untreated. Rather than exploring the sonic aspect of the voice, her interest
lies, she states, in “exploring the meaning and emotion of voice”.35 The voice in Lowlands is
decontextualised and unexpectedly urbanised. Here the voice expands from the architecture
itself along the emerging structure-borne sounds36 reverberating in space, forming a
multidimensional figure.

32M. Dolar ‘The acousmatics of the voice’ in A voice and Nothing More, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p.60.
33L. Corner, ‘The Art of noise: ‘sculptor in sound’ Susan Philipsz’, The Guardian, 14 November 2010,
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/nov/14/susan-philipsz-turner-prize-2010-sculptor-in-sound, (accessed 4
April 2018).
34L. Corner, ‘The Art of noise: ‘sculptor in sound’ Susan Philipsz’, The Guardian, 14 November 2010,

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/nov/14/susan-philipsz-turner-prize-2010-sculptor-in-sound, (accessed 4
April 2018).
35 ‘Turner Prize 2010: Susan Philipsz’, [online video], 2010, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/turner-prize-

2010-susan-philipsz, (accessed 15 May 2018).

36 sounds carried through walls and floors as well as through the air.

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Laurie Anderson recently revealed in an interview that early on in her career she realised she
“wanted to make singing sculptures”.37 Again, the two disciplines voice and sculpture are here
interweaved. Describing her move to New York, Anderson remembers her idealistic beginning
as an artist in the 1970s, making street art, opera and sculpture.38 Her background informs her
approach to the voice, as a plastic dimension to play with, applying pitch-shifting and time-
stretching with voice filters – vocoder.

In Anderson’s installations, the sculptural three-dimensional representation often takes the

form of projections. The Wire journalist Emily Bick tells us that Anderson began using the
technique of projection in the 1970s, “projecting versions of herself telling stories onto doll-
sized sculptures that you needed to lean in to listen to”39 - her first series of ‘talking statues’.
Combining projection technique and storytelling, Anderson pursued that direction throughout
the years with works using telepresence: Dal Vivo (1998) featured a series of tiny speaking
statues combining projections of images of Anderson’s body with the silent live projection of
detainee Santino Stefanini.40

Recently with Habeas Corpus (2015), the projected image of former Guantanamo Bay prisoner,
Mohammed El Gharani, was transmitted via the Internet and expanded into space.
El Gharani’s size and presence was amplified like a monumental ‘talking statue’ - “a sixteen-
foot-high sculpture of a seated human form”.41 Laurie Anderson provided a ‘voice-space’ for
El Gharani to share with the audience his detention experience as one of the youngest
prisoners.42

37 E. Stocker, ‘My last meal: Laurie Anderson’, Monocle, issue 93, vol. 10, May 2016,
https://monocle.com/magazine/issues/93/my-last-meal-laurie-anderson/, (accessed 31 May 2018).
38 ibid., p.224-225.
39 E. Bick, ‘Fables of Reconstruction’, The Wire, vol. 412, 2018, p.44.
40 cf. ‘Milan, Laurie Anderson: Dal Vivo’, Fondazione Prada, http://www.fondazioneprada.org/project/laurie-anderson-dal-

vivo/?lang=en, (accessed 14 November 2018).

41A. Ross, ‘Monumental’, The New York Times, 19 October 2015,

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/monumental-musical-events-alex-ross, (accessed 21 December 2018).

42 ‘Laurie Anderson & Mohammed el Gharani: Habeas Corpus’, [online video], 2015,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfuvAG_gXUM, (accessed 12 October 2018).

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Figure 3 Laurie Anderson: Habeas Corpus, Park Avenue Armory, NYC, 2015.

Discussing the ‘elasticity’ of the term sculpture, art theorist Rosalind Krauss states that “the
logic of sculpture is inseparable from the logic of the monument”.43 With its large-scale
projection, Habeas Corpus acts as a commemorative representation to communally
acknowledge and document the Guantanamo tragedy.

43 R. Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, vol.8, Spring, 1979, MIT press, p.33.

11
Another artist whose practice exists at the intersection of creation and documentation is Susan
Hiller. Hiller displays in Witness (2000) a voice ensemble of over 350 speakers suspended from
the ceiling. Installed at Tate Britain, Witness combines voices within a sculptural set-up
resulting in a polyphonic vocal composition – a ‘voice sculpture’.

Figure 4 Susan Hiller: Witness, Tate Britain, 2000.

Nurtured by her background in anthropology, Susan Hiller often investigates the overlooked
everyday real-life phenomena. With Witness, she deals with UFO sightings, having collected
one hundred stories of people sharing their singular encounter. Hiller chose this
multidimensional display to transmit these multiple stories simultaneously, mirroring the way
she experiences the world, with “a multitude of conversations” surrounding her and “so many
conflicting stories”.44
From the cluster of spoken voices, each speaker can act as a ‘headphone’, which can be pulled
to the ear to isolate a voice and single out a story. The type of speaker used - piezo - is
particularly responsive to voice frequencies.
Language is central to Hiller’s work. Other works with voices include Channels (2013) an
ensemble of televisions diffusing voices of multiple languages and Clinic (2004). Both audio
installations deal with people who have experienced death and returned to tell the tale.

44‘Susan Hiller: Talking Art’, [online video], 2008, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/susan-hiller-talking-art,

(accessed 4 May 2018).

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I was not able to experience Witness; my sources are from my research. However, I did
experience Channels at the exhibition Everything at Once (2018), which led me to pursue my
research on Susan Hiller.45

Hiller states that “her work is an archaeological investigation, uncovering something to make
a distinct of it.”46 In the sculptural set up of Witness, the experiencer can recover sound facts,
excavate a story and build a singular narrative through the action of placing a speaker close to
the ear. For Hiller, “sound gives you an intimate connection with the source, it sets up a close
relationship with people who are speaking.47 Witness relies on the willingness of the audience
to participate. For the work to be complete, the experiencer must wander through the ‘voice
sculpture’ and place a speaker close to the ear - as opposed to a more passive state of viewing
a painting in a museum.
Throughout the second half of the century, the idea of art changed. Kersten Glandien states
that “art as a social practice developed itself, the audience became a performer and a co-
creator”.48 Witness is an ‘open work’49, for the audience to experience and complete. The
temporal element makes the piece and its sound variable subjected to the behaviour of ‘the
experiencer’. Whereas in Janet Cardiff’s piece, The Forty Part Motet, the duration and content
of the audio remains stable, on a loop.

In Witness, the multidimensional array of speakers evokes a gigantic spider web. Hiller’s set-
up is allowing the audience to browse audio content physically whilst navigating the structure
and its cloud of voices. The cloud here is one speaker away as opposed to one click away. We
have in Witness an anticipation of the digital navigation of the Internet. Hiller’s piece provides
a multiple user interface to access in a physical environment large documentation data and
witness reports.
In 1951, French documentarist Suzanne Briet wrote that the documentary techniques
demonstrate two distinct trends: the first one pushing for a further abstract, algorithmic mode

45 cf. Everything at Once, London, http://everythingatonce.com, (accessed 15 November 2018).

46 ‘Susan Hiller: Talking Art’, [online video], op. cit.
47 ‘Susan Hiller: Talking Art’, [online video], op. cit.

48 K. Glandien, ‘Sound and Interactivity’ in Theory and History of Sound Art, Digital Music and Sound Art, University of

Brighton, UK, 18 April 2018.

49 U. Eco, ‘The Poetics of the Open Work (1959)’ in Audio Culture Readings in Modern Music, eds. C. Cox & D. Warner,

Continuum, New York and London, 2004, p.167.

13
of archiving documentary elements whilst the second trend pushing towards a massive
extension of substitutes for lived experiences, through films, television, recordings and
photos.50 Briet was anticipating how close creation knowledge and documentation would
become in Art, a close relationship at the centre of Hiller’s practice.

Other examples of ‘voice sculpture’ using a similar principle of suspended speakers are Days
(2009) by American artist Bruce Nauman and Respire (2008) by Canadian sound and radio artist
Anna Friz.
Both artists ‘s work explores voice and language. Created for the Venice Biennale, Days consists
of a continuous stream of seven voices randomly reciting the days of the week. The set-up is
composed of fourteen suspended speakers, which are “installed in two rows, with one voice
emanating from each pair of speakers as the visitor passes between them”.51

Figure 5 Bruce Nauman: Days, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009.

50 S. Briet, Qu’est ce que la documentation?, Éditions documentaires, industrielles et techniques, Paris, 1951, p.30.
51 Moma, ‘Bruce Nauman: Days’, https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1057, (accessed 14 August 2018).

14
Anna Friz’ s installation Respire is based from the sounds of breathing and other bodily
exclamations embedded in “a multi-channel array of radio receivers suspended above visitor’s
heads”.52

Figure 6 Anna Friz: Respire, RadiaLX, Lisbon, 2008.

52 A. Friz, ‘Respire’, 12 July 2009, http://nicelittlestatic.com/sound-radio-artworks/respire/, (accessed 15 August 2018).

15
 3- The extended voice in performing art

Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, many theatrical events - happenings53 - were
created by artists. The early 1960s mark the development of ‘concept art’ - a term coined by
Henry Flint54 - when the idea in the work takes precedence over aesthetic concerns.
Yoko Ono, one of the most prolific artists of that time, produces her first instructional piece,
Painting to See the Room (1961)55 – an artwork meant for others to create following her
instructions - thus pushing visual art further towards conceptualism.

Ono also explores sound and voice with another instructional piece, Voice Piece for
Soprano (1961), initially performed when Ono became a member of the Fluxus group56. The
piece was recently revisited at MoMA as a participatory work.57 Museum visitors were invited
to take a microphone and follow Ono’s instructions, posted on the wall: “Scream. 1. against
the wind; 2. against the wall; 3. against the sky.”

Figure 7 Yoko Ono: Voice Piece for Soprano, MoMa, 2010.

53 term coined by artist Allan Kaprow in the 1950s.

54 S. Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, Bloomsbury, New York, 2009, p.57.
55 E. Yi Hsuan Lu, ‘Instruction Paintings: Yoko Ono and 1960s Conceptual Art’, Shift Graduate Journal of Visual and Material

Culture, issue 6, 2013, p.3.

56 an international avant-garde collective or network of artists and composers founded in the 1960s.
57 J. Persse, ‘From a Whisper to a Scream: Following Yoko Ono’s Instructions’, Inside/Out, 14 July 2010,

https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2010/07/14/from-a-whisper-to-a-scream-following-yoko-onos-instructions/,
(accessed 27 March 2018).

16
Amplified throughout the gallery, the voice reveals itself as a sonic element for its capacity of
forces and pressures, reaching momentum, similarly to the vocal techniques displayed in
Opera. In physics, the momentum is the product of mass and velocity, referring to the quantity
of motion that an object has - here the voice. From the physics of sound to the politics of
sound, Ono identifies these screams in motion as a “protest song”.58
What happens to the voice when we scream? The voice organ is “an instrument consisting of
a power supply (the lungs), an oscillator (the vocal folds) and a resonator (the larynx, pharynx
and mouth.)”.59 We would need to add that the body itself is the structural foundation from
which the voice draws to generate such power. Ono’s voice, powered and projected acts as a
noise device similar to the noise effect of a heavy truck passing by at 1 m, 90 dB (decibel)60,
which is considered very loud and certainly capable of shifting vast masses of air. Sound waves,
which are created by a disturbance - here the scream – propagate through the air.
Ono ‘s voice is piercing through form, ‘sculpting’ the air whose particles transmit the sound: a
‘pierced form’ emerges - British sculptor Barbara Hepworth was the first one to pierce through
the material with Pierced Form carved in 1931.61

Invisible at first, the voice carried here by the air is seemingly forming a dense sonic matter,
which deploys itself in space. Our brain processes the audio data, rendering a sound picture,
which appears to us multidimensional: a sculpture of air from voice. Sound-sculptor Lukas
Kühne states that his favourite material to sculpt is the air.62 Didn’t designer Harry Bertoia
state of his famous diamond chair that it was "mainly made of air, like sculpture"?63

58 S. Douglas, ‘Between a Dance and a Scream: A Q&A with Yoko Ono’, Blouin Artinfo, 15 July 2010,
http://www.blouinartinfo.com/features/article/35186-between-a-dance-and-a-scream-a-qa-with-yoko-ono , (accessed 27
March 2018).
59 J. Sundberg, ‘The acoustics of the Singing Voice’, Scientific American, Vol.236, No.3, March 1977, p.82.
60 A. Hugill, The Digital Musician, Routlegde, London and New York, 2008, p.38.
61 B. Hepworth, ‘The Sculptor Speaks’ in Writings and Conversations, ed. S. Bowness, Tate publishing, London, 2015, p.154.
62 Artishock, ‘Mi territorio es acústica pura’, Artishock Revista, 2 December 2015,

http://artishockrevista.com/2015/12/02/lukas-kuhne-escultor-sonoro-territorio-acustica-pura/, (accessed 17 March 2018).

63 The Wire News, ‘Harry Bertoia sound sculpture recordings set for release’, The Wire, 21 November 2014,

https://www.thewire.co.uk/news/34216/harry-bertoia-sound-sculpture-recordings-set-for-release, (accessed 20 June 2018).

17
Figure 8 Barbara Hepworth: Pierced Form, 1931.

Long-standing voice explorer, artist Mikhail Karikis has been investigating the voice as a
physical and sculptural material. Karikis states that he stretches his voice to extreme,
manipulating it using his throat.64
In the two- channel video, Promise Me (2012), he is seen bending his face attempting to project
the sound. A photographic series, Sculpting Voice (2010) was also produced to investigate “the
material and plastic properties of breath and the voice”.65

Figure 9 Mikhail Karikis: Sculpting Voice, 2010. .

64 ‘Mikhail Karikis: The voice as sculpture’, [online video], 2017, https://vimeo.com/239862208 ,(accessed 21 April 2018).
65 M. Karikis, ‘The shape of breath’, 18 July 2015, http://www.mikhailkarikis.com/2015/07/18/sculpting-voice-2010/
,(accessed 21 June 2018).

18
There is a long-line of vocalists who have explored the voice, applying extreme bending and
carving to it. Belgian avant-garde vocalist Catherine Jauniaux is using her shaping techniques
in the tradition of Cathy Berberian66 to carve, manipulate and project her voice. ‘The Institute
for Living Voice’, founded by David Moss in 2001, has had for guests voice experimenters such
as Jaap Blonk, Diamanda Galas, Shelley Hirsch, Joan La Barbara. These vocalists are sculpting
their own matter in a complete appropriation of their own body. Barbara Hepworth defined
sculpture as “a three-dimensional projection of primitive feeling: touch, texture, size and scale,
hardness and warmth, evocation and compulsion to move, live and love”.67 There is something
exhilarating and indeed primitive in working directly with who we are, carving from our own
corporeality, carving our voice. Similarly, Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono and Susan Philipsz have
been working in sound art with their own voice material.

The term ‘sculpture’ as we have seen has been appropriated by Janet Cardiff, Susan Philipsz
and others to define their sound work. Sculpture is the art of making three-dimensional forms,
representative or abstract, it is to make a form by one of “four basic processes: carving,
modelling, casting, constructing” 68 therefore, to a certain extent, we can speak of a ‘sculpted
voice’ in the context of Yoko Ono and the voice-experimenters mentioned above.
In ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (1979), Rosalind Krauss states that categories like sculpture
and painting “have been stretched and twisted in an extraordinary demonstration of
elasticity”.69 She argues that over the last ten years rather surprising things have come to be
called sculpture. Sculpture, a “historically bounded”70 category has been unbound.

66 cf. Cathy Berberian, http://cathyberberian.com, (accessed 25 June 2018).

67 B. Hepworth, ‘Drawings from a Sculptor’s Landscape’ in Writings and Conversations, ed. S. Bowness, Tate publishing,
London, 2015, p.154.
68 Tate, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/sculpture, (accessed 24 August 2018).
69 Krauss, op. cit., p.30.

70 Krauss, op. cit., p.33.

19
 4- Reclaiming the voice

Why is the voice often shunned by artists?

Susan Hiller admits that the use of the voice in art has been abandoned. Hiller states:
The use of voice is fascinating for artists because voice is body. In the 1990s when the
critical discourse was all around the body, the work with voice was left out as though
body meant representing the body, yet the notion of voice was never dealt with.71

Voice is often perceived as too concrete. Since the second half of the 20th century art
practitioners oriented themselves towards a process and an experience rather than towards a
message or self-expression. Voice found itself at the centre of this shift as language is inevitably
linked to the message. From realism to abstraction, art repositioned itself and so did the
medium of the voice. Pierre Schaeffer was in favour of “defamiliarising the sound”72: by cutting
the attack and delay, the sound could no longer be associated to its origin. When applying a
similar principle to the voice, the vocal sound could be dissociated from the human voice.

The reduction of language to sound was explored by many artists - mainly male artists - as early
as 1913 in the form of sound poetry with Dada and the Futurists73. In the interwar period, Kurt
Schwitters, with his sonata Ursonate74, explored the voice as texture, as a projected material.
Throughout the second half of the century, Henri Chopin performed his audio-poems, a
‘musique concrète’ of voices.
Kersten Glandien underlines “the sonic dimension of the human voice and in particular the
relation between the speech and sound”. To step away from realism, the performance art
voice took shape as a phoneme75, abstracted of its meaning. The technological progress made
voice manipulation possible: the semantic could be spliced, pitched away, voice could exist as
a sonic texture in its plastic abstraction.

71 ‘Susan Hiller: Recall Selected Works 1969-2004’, dir. Malkin G., UK, Baltic, 2004, (DVD).
72 K. Glandien. ‘Soundscape’ in Theory and History of Sound Art, Digital Music and Sound Art, University of Brighton, UK, 25
April 2018.
73 cf. F. T. Marinetti, Zang Tumb Tumb. 1914.
74 Ursonate, a sonata in primordial sounds, 1922-1932.
75 Smallest unit of sound within a spoken word, from Greek ‘phonema’ which means sound.

20
However, when untreated the voice retains a familiarity, revealing intimacy. One could say the
voice appears perhaps then too human.
From this research, we can outline that the voice now appears to be investigated much more
by female sound artists. In the second half of the 20th century, women brought their identity
into art to discuss feminist issues. They dealt with the body and so they embraced voices.
Susan Hiller believes that one of her commitments to working with language was strengthened
by the women’s movement and her understanding of herself as a female.76
We could draw a parallel between the emancipation of voice through technology and the
emancipation of women through the appropriation of these newly democratised tools, making
the voice heard through sound and art: voice as a feminist strategy for self-representation.
The re-appropriation of the voice goes even further as we have seen many female artists
choose to work directly from their own vocal matter. They are reclaiming their own voices, a
voice whose sound has been much criticised. Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson is
demonstrating in ‘The Gender of Sound’ how much the sound itself of women’s voices has
been rejected over the centuries since the Greek classics. Carson states that “putting a door
on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to
the present day”.77

The voice remains a vast territory of exploration and hopefully beyond gender categorisation.
Multidisciplinary artist Amy Cunningham who uses the singing voice in her practice founded
the research network The Voice Laboratory in 2009 to explore further the role of voice in
contemporary art.78 Artists have challenged the plastic dimension of voice through various
mediums, recording, sound art installation and performance. Voice - the original instrument-
is a timeless and flexible instrument, which will always have its relevance, as long as humanity
exists, voice will be explored and challenged.

76 ‘Susan Hiller: Talking Art’, [online video], op. cit.

77 A. Carson, ‘The Gender of Sound’ in Audio Culture Readings in Modern Music, eds. C. Cox & D. Warner, Bloomsbury, New
York and London, 2018, p.45.
78 cf. ‘Voice Laboratory’, http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/staff/amy-cunningham/voice-laboratory, (accessed 18 November 2018).

21
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Hugill, Andrew. The Digital Musician. Routlegde, London and New York, 2008.

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22
Leitner, Bernhard. P.U.L.S.E. Cantz, Ostfildern, 2008.

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MacDonald, Corina. ‘Scoring the Work: Documenting Practice and Performance in Variable Media
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23
Journal Articles (online)

Ingleton, Holly. ‘Her Noise: Identifying Feminist Strategies’. Reflections on Process in Sound, issue 1,
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MacKay, Robert. ‘A Concert for Artificial and Human Voices’. Reflections on Process in Sound, issue 3,
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Magazine and Newspaper article (print)

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Magazine and Newspaper article (website)

Artishock. ‘Mi territorio es acústica pura’. Artishock Revista, 2 December 2015,

http://artishockrevista.com/2015/12/02/lukas-kuhne-escultor-sonoro-territorio-acustica-pura/,
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Barry, Robert. ‘Critical Stargazing: An Interview with Laurie Anderson’. The Quietus, 3 August 2010,
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http://www.fondazioneprada.org/project/laurie-anderson-dal-vivo/?lang=en , (accessed 02
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Krcatovich, Dustin. ‘Joan La Barbara Voice is the Original Instrument’. The Quietus, 29 April 2016,
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14 August 2018).

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24
Persse, Jason. ‘From a Whisper to a Scream: Following Yoko Ono’s Instructions’. Inside/Out, 14 July
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Lectures

Glandien, Kersten. ‘Soundscape’ in Theory and History of Sound Art, Digital Music and Sound Art,
University of Brighton, UK, 25 April 2018.

Glandien, Kersten. ‘Sound and Interactivity’ in Theory and History of Sound Art, Digital Music and
Sound Art, University of Brighton, UK, 18 April 2018.

Glandien, Kersten. ‘Sound in Space Enclosed II’ in Theory and History of Sound Art, Digital Music and
Sound Art, University of Brighton, UK, 14 March 2018.

Technical ressources

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April 2018).

Beat Repeat by Ableton, https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/guide-beat-repeat-quantize-courses/ ,

(accessed 12 October 2018).

Spear by Klingbeil, Michael, http://www.klingbeil.com/spear , (accessed 4rth May 2018).

Artist websites

Azzaro, Gilles, http://www.gillesazzaro.com/pages/fr/bio.htm, (accessed 17 May 2018).

Baschet, François, http://francois.baschet.free.fr, (accessed 16 July 2018).
Berberian, Cathy, http://cathyberberian.com, (accessed 25 June 2018).
Cardiff, Janet, http://www.cardiffmiller.com, (accessed 21 February 2018).
Friz, Anna, http://nicelittlestatic.com/, (accessed 5 May 2018).
Friz, Anna, ‘Respire’, [web blog], 12 July 2009, http://nicelittlestatic.com/sound-radio-
artworks/respire/ , (accessed 15 August 2018).

25
Hiller, Susan, http://www.susanhiller.org, (accessed 25 April 2018).
Karikis, Mikhail, http://www.mikhailkarikis.com , (accessed 27 March 2018).
Karikis, Mikhail, ‘The shape of breath’, [web blog], 18 July 2015,
http://www.mikhailkarikis.com/2015/07/18/sculpting-voice-2010/ ,(accessed 21 June 2018).
Ono, Yono, http://imaginepeace.com, (accessed 27 March 2018).
Ratkje, Maja, http://ratkje.no, (accessed 3 July 2018).
Wishart, Trevor, http://www.trevorwishart.co.uk, (accessed 27 April 2018).

List of audio-visual materials

‘AudioSculpt 3: Sculpt the sound’, [online video], 2007,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN4AVFt32og , (accessed 7 May 2018).

‘Christoph Cox – History of Sound Art’, [online video], 2017,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh_5_CAySXY , (accessed 3 February 2018).

‘Her Noise Symposium I Affinities, Networks and Heroines I Vocal Folds’, [audio file], 2012
http://hernoise.org/interactions/feminisms-the-sonic/symposium/, (accessed 11 May 2018).

‘Janet Cardiff’, [online video], 2017, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/videos/tateshots/janet-cardiff,

(accessed 29 March 2018).

‘[FLVMoMA] Janet Cardiff on her work The Forty Part Motet’, [online video], 2017,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ5xgKVZNmA , (accessed 29 March 2018).

‘Laurie Anderson & Mohammed el Gharani: Habeas Corpus’, [online video], 2015,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfuvAG_gXUM , (accessed 12 October 2018)

‘Lunch with Bernhard Leitner’, [online video], 2015,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzYyuBBHMyA , (accessed 21 April 2018).

‘Mikhail Karikis: The voice as sculpture’, [online video], 2017, https://vimeo.com/239862208 ,

(accessed 21 April 2018).

‘One Collective Breath: Janet Cardiff's The Forty Part Motet’, [online video], 2015,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZXBia5kuqY , (accessed 29 March 2018).

‘Susan Hiller: Installing Witness’, [online video], 2011, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-

comment/video/susan-hiller-installing-witness , (accessed 15 May 2018).

‘Susan Hiller: Talking Art’, [online video], 2008,

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/susan-hiller-talking-art , (accessed 4 May 2018).

‘Susan Hiller: Recall Selected Works 1969-2004’, dir. Malkin G., UK, Baltic, 2004, [DVD].

‘Turner Prize 2010: Susan Philipsz’, [online video], 2010, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-

comment/video/turner-prize-2010-susan-philipsz , (accessed 15 May 2018).

‘Voice Piece for Soprano & Wish Tree at MoMA Summer 2010 by Yoko Ono’, [online video], 2010,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GMHl7bmlzw , (accessed 12 December 2018).

26
List of works
Anderson, Laurie. Dal Vivo, 1998.
Anderson, Laurie. Habeas Corpus, 2015.
Azarro, Gilles. Barack Obama: The Next Industrial Revolution, 2013.
Baschet, François and Bernard. Les Sculptures Sonores, 1952.
Berberian, Cathy. Stripsody, 1966.
Bertoia, Harry. Diamond Chair, 1952.
Blonk, Jaap. Flux de Bouche, 1993.
Cardiff, Janet and Miller, George Bures. Forest (for a thousand years…), 2012.
Cardiff, Janet. The Forty Part Motet, Fondation Louis Vuitton, 2001.
Cardiff, Janet. The Missing Voice (Case Study B), 1999.
Chopin, Henri. Audiopoems, 1956-1980.
Cunningham, Amy. Oracle, 2012.
Friz, Anna. Respire, 2008.
Friz, Anna. You are far from us, 2006-2008.
Galas, Diamanda. Vena Cava, 1993.
Hepworth, Barbara. Pierced Form, 1931.
Herndon, Holly. Chorus, 2014.
Jauniaux, Catherine. Fluvial, 1983.
Karikis, Mikhail. Sculpting voice, 2010.
Karikis, Mikhail. Promise Me, 2012.
Karikis, Mikhail. The Shape of Breath, 2005.
Harvey, Jonathan. Speakings, 2008
Hiller, Susan. Channels, The Store Studios, 2013.
Hiller, Susan. Clinic, 2004.
Hiller, Susan. Witness, Tate Britain, 2000.
Hirsch, Shelley. O Little Town of East New York, 1995.
La Barbara, Joan. Voice is the Original Instrument, 1976.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. Zang Tumb Tumb, 1914.
Nauman, Bruce. Days, 2009.
Ono, Yoko. Voice Piece for Soprano,1961.
Ono, Yoko. Painting to See the Room, 1961.
Philipsz, Susan. Lowlands, 2010.
Ratkje, Maja. Voice, 2002.
Rollin, Monique. Étude vocale [Motet], 1952.
Schwitters, Kurt. An Anna Blume, 1919.
Schwitters, Kurt. Merzbau, 1933.
Schwitters, Kurt. Ursonate, 1932.
Tallis, Thomas. Spem in Alium, 1573.
Tuulikki, Hanna. Away with the birds, 2014.
Rauschenberg, Robert. Soundings, 1963.
Webb, Olivia. Voices Project, 2014.
Wishart, Trevor. Vox cycle, 1990.

27
List of figures
Figure 1: Gilles Azzaro, Barack Obama: The Next Industrial Revolution, 2013.
Photographer unknown ©Gilles Azzaro, http://www.gillesazzaro.com , (accessed 16 November 2018).

Figure 2: Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet, 2001.

Photographer unknown ©Janet Cardiff. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York and
Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/87291 , (accessed 16
November 2018).

Figure 3: Laurie Anderson, Habeas Corpus, 2015.

Photographer James Ewing ©Art Media ARTNEWS, http://www.artnews.com/2015/10/01/prison-
break-laurie-anderson-on-projecting-a-former-guantanamo-detainee-into-the-park-avenue-armory/ ,
(accessed 16 November 2018).

Figure 4: Susan Hiller, Witness, 2000.

Photographer Tate Photography/Sam Drake ©Susan Hiller,
https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/susan-hiller-tate-britain/2234, (accessed 16 November 2018).

Figure 5: Bruce Nauman, Days, 2009.

Photographer Jason Wierzbicki ©Philadelphia Museum of Art,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/arts/design/18nauman.html , (accessed 16 November 2018).

Figure 6: Anna Friz, Respire, 2008.

Photographer Tom Blanchard ©Anna Friz, http://nicelittlestatic.com/sound-radio-artworks/respire/ ,
(accessed 16 November 2018).

Figure 7: Yoko Ono, Voice Piece for Soprano, 2010.

Photographer unknown ©Yoko Ono, http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/finch/moma-
permanent-collection7-1-10_detail.asp?picnum=1, (accessed 16 November 2018).

Figure 8: Barbara Hepworth, Pierced Form, 1931.

Photographer Paul Laib ©Witt Library Courtauld Institute of Art London,
http://barbarahepworth.org.uk/sculptures/1932/pierced-form/, (accessed 16 November 2018).

Figure 9: Mikhail Karikis, Sculpting Voice, 2010.

Photographer unknown ©Mikhail Karikis, http://www.mikhailkarikis.com/2015/07/18/sculpting-
voice-2010/ , (accessed 16 November 2018).

28