On VOICES

2014-03-05

Greta Vileikytė

We usually think of voice as a sound produced in a person’s larynx and uttered through the mouth, as speech or song. As well as a quality of singing, so it could include features as dialect, language, even mouth structure. But all these features are only a part of sounds that surrounds us. And perception, which allows human beings to live in this sound-shaped-world, our environment surrounded by constant sounds that we hear. The auditory scene is a process which is a bit pushed aside, but brings to us a spatial understanding and awareness. By this we perceive distance, direction, loudness, pitch and tone of many individual sounds simultaneously, more a sense of reality rather than a vision. It’s an auditor. If you don’t want to see, it’s possible to close your eyes and be left with your imagination or reflecting visions in your mind, but sound is more difficult to shut out. A vision can record everything, but it concentrates on different parts or special elements. Different sounds seem to be harder to separate and distinguish. With technique, it’s possible to manipulate this perception. There are recorders and sounds systems that sometimes sound better than reality.

Migrating Art Academies laboratory VOICES, hosted by Gigacircus Media Art Group, invited emerging artists from different parts of the world to experience Villefagnan together with artists Sylvie Marchand (FR) and Horacio Gonzales (ES). Their idea was to explore the voice and hearing of other phenomena through technological approaches and through the discovery of surrounding local sounds. Is Voice, our keyword and starting point, something that we do, or something that we hear, or both?

It is an element of socializing, even without a sharing language. There is always a possibility to express ideas or content by use of an expressive voice and manners, including body language. But it depends, of course, on patience, openness and intuition. By manipulating it you can build up all of the story, change it or trick one’s perception of it. It is easy to experience this when you are a non-French speaking visitor in France.

Without a common language, socializing becomes a bit primitive and that charming, even romantic image of being lost vanishes as first you start to notice that you actually can’t understand a single word. Maybe it depends on being a closed person, or maybe only I had this strange feeling about a strange place. All these misunderstood situations inspired me to think about another side of communication, from a verbal way to an intentional experiencing of it. It led to an idea of miscommunication, misunderstanding and chaos. Honestly, by myself it became a small scene of theatre shrouded with politeness.

A good example was a workshop about mis-translation. We invited a very expressive and cheerful local French man, who told three stories in French. These stories had to be interpreted by participants of the laboratory (who didn’t speak French). In one way, each person’s character, experience and even cultural background could influence and shape up those stories to become very different ones. Of course, interpretations were quite far away from the reality of his stories… It became a practical work to warm up our imaginations: you are in France, this is old Mediaeval village, it’s possible to guess Monsieur’s age and there is one keyword for each story. So all the stories build up in their own ways through every person’s way of thinking. So the voice of stories is shaped by knowledge and personal experiences. Sometimes even by the sense of humour.

After this workshop I considered the idea of sound in comparison to vision. In the context of thinking about perceptional blindness – the well-known story of how native Americans could not see Columbus’s clipper ships at sea because they had never seen them before. The tribe shaman was one of the first to perceive these foreign things after long days of observation. Only then he was able to convey this information to other members of the tribe. And because of the trust, they too began to see those ships. It’s possible that they first saw them as giant fish at sea, because that was the closest thing to their reality or (visual memories) that they could relate to. How does it work in visual and auditory spheres, if perception depends on experience and knowledge? By being unsure about what you are hearing? So it’s an open question, probably easy to explain.

Our invitation letter mentioned dogs, who hear sounds that are outside of our frequency spectrum, so that we cannot experience them. This led to a utopian idea of a general system of sounds, and to wonder of a possibility to organize it and represent in the same way within different cultures. Do we hear the same sound, but receive and interpret it in different ways because of our differing cultures? As the same dog barks in England – wuf wuf, in Lithuania he barks au au.

Throughout the week the voices and sounds were considered from a number of different perspectives. Meeting with sound artists Claire Bergereaut and Patrick Treguer who introduced the “stick slip” – a scientific term defining the ‘study of forces of friction between two surfaces sliding on one another’. To Claire and Patrick, they are the frequencies created by voice and cello, which, when gathered together can build up unexpected sounds and be performed in an unusual way. The technical parts we discovered with the help of artist and tutor Horacio Gonzales, with his suggestion to explore voice and sound and use it as a creative resource for making a soundmap – soundwalk event, to use “small voices”, all the sounds that are happening around our everyday life – talking, singing, or any use of voice, and he enriched our creative field with similar opportunities through tutorials and lectures about technical issues from microphone building to a Pure Data open source program.

We explored the local space – the Villefagnan area, with organized events. Space as well has its own importance and influence on dealing with the question of SOUNDS, which may be discovered through the influence of geographical location, political or historical situation as well as through the relief of agricultural land. We were invited to experience this land through sounds. The land can be represented through it’s natural soundscape or can be formed into new one through an emotional and creative way of sensing a place. The sightseeing became sighthearing and built up a space through different sound points. It was a pleasure to meet local people, even though some speak no English. A small town that doesn’t appear to have changed much since the Middle Ages, provided a mysterious and calming atmosphere.

Outcomes and results

The work of our participants took the topic in various ways and by the end of the week it was clear that there are many ways to understand, explore and use sound or voice in different contexts, from social to human conscious or perceptional ways. Probably all of those ideas were fluttering around and brought our final works to be presented at an event.

So shortly looking through artistic results it shows the different approaches and themes of each participant. Raquel Rodriguez Izquierdo researched the feminine genealogy of local place by socializing and collecting some objects with cavities, cups or teapots, that belonged to the women of the town. She recovered all their narratives by making a board from collected items with silently recorded stories. It brought a feeling of importance and patience to those fragile and short stories hiding under collected items from local women. Valia Fetisov placed a car a bit outside, near gates, which produced a beeping sound every time somebody passed the car. A car awareness system intended to attract attention and invite people to a project exhibition place. Oscar Octavio Soza Figueroa worked on the impact of new technologies and open source community on human senses and its extensions. He created the possibility to produce recorded sounds by touching different materials. Perceptional games of voice and a site specific object – a stone in the village by Rosalind McLachlan and Greta Vileikytė, tricked with a short story about mystical local space, whispering – “Place itself has a story…” And as a final performance – a soundscape built from field recordings and shaped into a composition by Rostislav Rekuta.

Photo: Rosalind McLachlan and Greta Vileikyte. Place itself has a story