• RESOUNDING THE VOICE. On repurposing the archival material of voice, from analogue to digital.

    Author(s):
    Olivia Louvel (see profile)
    Date:
    2020
    Group(s):
    Music and Sound
    Subject(s):
    Archival materials, Sound art, Library materials--Digitization, Archival materials--Digitization, Archives
    Item Type:
    Thesis
    Institution:
    University of Brighton
    Tag(s):
    resounding, Electroacoustic music, Digitisation, Voice
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/4206-2377
    Abstract:
    This research investigates the practice of resounding the archival material of voice, when translating the sound object from analogue to digital. The author is focussing on the voice as spoken word, when the archival voice has been temporarily overlooked but preserved. Since technological progress allowed us to record, we have been accumulating vast quantities of archival documents. What to do with all the voices from the past? The archives have been vastly explored in contemporary art with the increase phenomenon of artists as archivists. How can the archival voice refer to itself over time with the artistic practice of resounding? The author draws from her practice of resounding the voice of Barbara Hepworth from an archival tape unearthed at the British Library - 'The Sculptor Speaks' (2020). Anchoring her research on Christian Zanési’ s 'Arkheion' (1995) and Wajid Yaseen’ s 'Tape Letters' (2018), the author examines how both practitioners build an active relationship with the archival material - no longer static. Zanési engages with the archived voice of Pierre Schaeffer and the legacy of musique concrète, whilst Yaseen "re/presents" the voices of the Pakistan community in Great Britain by resounding cassettes used as a mode of long-distance communication. The resounding is a transformative practice whose properties consist of changing the original status of the archive with digital manipulations, morphing and relocating the audio signal in time and space, thus re-contextualising the archival document for a new audience. However, the link to the original purpose is not dissimulated, the original voice refers to itself. The archival voice behaves as a moving entity, evolving according to time and context. The practice of resounding is the art of liberating the magnetic presence of the voices from the past sound-objects: it is a re-appearance of the voice - morphed and fluid - operating in the field of the aural transmission.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    2 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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