Monday, February 11, 2013

The Voice Within the Voice

There is a memorable line in David Mitchell's novel, Cloud Atlas, when a fugitive human clone, Sonmi-451, is taken to the "facescaper," ne plus ultra of plastic surgeons, to alter her well-known cloned features. This particular facescaper is regarded as the best in the business, which she attributes to her ability to "see the face within the face." I thought of this recently when trying to describe a quality which I believe many of the most memorable voices have: they reveal the "voice within the voice".

This is the voice beyond the meaning of the words spoken and beyond the aesthetic qualities of the voice heard. In his excellent monograph, A Voice and Nothing More, Mladen Dolar calls this the "object voice,"  and delineates the two ways we lose or mask it: either we over-focus upon what a person is saying (the message), or we over-focus on the quality of the sound, as when we listen to a singer (the aesthetics). Both paths lead us to miss the object voice, which becomes completely covered by sound or meaning.

We seem aware that the voices have the power to affect our minds independent of text and aesthetics, and we can see this power in examples from religious or mystical rituals to fiction and Hollywood. Call-and-response patterns in a ceremony, especially with a well-known text, let us feel how vocal sound can penetrate the mind when text has lost all surprise, but beauty of sound has no relevance. To be affected by an outside voice makes us aware of voices' special access to our psyches, to comfort but also to hurt or control. In the sci-fi novel Dune, a caste of witch-nuns called the Bene Gesserit study the psychoacoustic properties of voice in such detail that they can use "the Voice," a special way of speaking which allows one to control the listener like a puppet. No less disturbing are the real cases of schizophrenics powerless to resist the demands of voices in their heads.

Horror movies' numerous demonic possessions, and even Gandalf showing his otherworldly side, use technological tricks to depict this excess of voice beyond sound and meaning, where the voice itself can command power over others. Perhaps it is necessary to alter the actor's voice electronically or by mixing it with another actor's voice because, as Dolar suggests, the excess of voice over sound and meaning is also its excess over and separation from the body. David Lynch depicts this in one of my favorite scenes from Lost Highway, where the Mystery Man has literally too many voices, but also a voice which exceeds the bounds of time and space.

What about voice divorced from body completely? A famous example of this uncanny effect, which Dolar cites in his book, is the mother's voice in Psycho:
[Think] of Hitchcock's Psycho, which revolves entirely around the question "Where does the mother's voice come from? To which body can it be assigned? We can immediately see that a voice without a body is inherently uncanny, and that the body to which it is assigned does not dissipate its haunting effect. (p. 61)
Horror movies also frequently use this "voice without a body" trope (Dolar's book, incidentally, is where I found the title for this blog) in menacing phone calls. Imagine the lack of chills had the opening of Scream been filmed this way instead, or handled via text message.

In music, both technique and technology can be used not just to amplify the voice, conform to a style, or create innovative sound colors (this would keep us within the aesthetic dimension of the voice), but to amplify this sense of the voice's excess over body, and thus give us a peek at the object voice. In The Knife and another solo project, Fever Ray, singer and composer Karin Dreijer Andersson often uses extensive electronic processing of her vocals, the goal being, according to interviews, is to remove the audience's identification with a personality via the voice; ironically, Karin's voice (with or without processing) is the most striking thing about her records. Selective and creative use of electronic processing not only provides aesthetic variety, but creates a mutating voice which belongs to no one. Another famous Anderson made her career in the early 80’s on the same insight: clever and targeted use of technology can create an overall context in which even the plain spoken voice no longer sounds everyday.

The great vocal traditions of the world, of course, had no such technological resources to create a mutating voice, and draw very real boundaries of style which may seem to contrast with the supposedly limitless colors electronic processing can achieve. How is it that vocal technique might also reveal the voice within the voice? Horkheimer and Adorno write:
In every work of art, style is a promise. In being absorbed through style into the dominant form of universality, into the current musical, pictorial, or verbal idiom, what is expressed seeks to be reconciled with the idea of the true universal. This promise of the work of art to create truth by impressing its unique contours on the socially transmitted forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical.... Yet it is only in its struggle with tradition, a struggle precipitated in style, that art can find expression for suffering. The moment in the work of art by which it transcends reality cannot indeed, be severed from style; that moment, however, does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable unity of form and content, inner and outer, individual and society, but in those traits in which the discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 103)
I believe a similar point should be made about the voice: in the "passionate striving" for mastery of a vocal style, a the "discrepancy" of the object voice emerges, and "what is expressed" can be recognized with the idea of the "true universal," a voice within the voice. This implies two things:

First, dilettantism is impossible. While technical perfection, stylistic purity, or other "questionable [unities] of form and content" cannot be the whole goal, the performer's "passionate striving for identity" must include fidelity and respect to the tradition. If a singer stops practicing and declares himself "good enough," this is not a "necessary failure" but a chosen one. There should instead be no end to the striving.

Second, the limits of commercialized music become clear. Passionate striving to attain mastery of a style, as just noted, is about trying and failing for perfection, about Martha Graham's "queer, divine dissatisfaction". Neither the logic of selling infinitely more nor the logic of having sold enough can motivate this passion; striving for commercial success is about commerce, not art. It may be satisfying and one may be good at it, but it's not divine.