Voicetracks: Attuning to Voice in Media and the Arts (Leonardo Book Series) by Norie Neumark

Author:Norie Neumark [Neumark, Norie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: media art, aesthetics, attunement, media, new media, posthumanism, Indigenous, non-human, new materialism, Aboriginal, other, listening, sound studies, voice
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2017-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

Loudspeakers, loud speakers

We use the term “loudspeaker” or “speakers” so casually that the sense that these objects are ‘speakers,’ that they are speaking, has been lost. Why do we call them speakers if not to convey a sense that they are indeed speaking, not just playing back or amplifying? And, if they are speaking, what is their voice? Is it simply the voice that has been recorded or is being amplified live, for which they are transparent devices of recording and playback (van Eck 2013, 157),1 or do they perhaps have something to say? I’d say that it depends on how and where you listen. I first started to think about this in relation to works by Brandon LaBelle, in which he places loudspeakers among the audience. This simple placement can subtly disturb the sense that these are simply playback devices and can foreground the ‘speaking’ quality of speakers themselves.

In one of LaBelle’s recent works, A Rehearsal for the People’s Microphone (2015),2 I notice that if I stand in front of them, the speakers sound like traditional playback devices for recorded voices. But if I stand to the side, I still hear voices but cannot ascertain their source or who, indeed, is speaking here—I keep looking around in confusion. In this listening askew, it is as if the loudspeakers in this rehearsal speak otherwise, daring to take over. In a way, what the work also tells of is relationality and voice—not only the importance of the listener’s position and disposition, but also of the voice itself that speaks to the listener and the always/already embodiment of the so-called disembodied voices of recording and playback.3 What I am hearing is the speakers as uncannily live—voicing their own voice? Because as hard as I listen, there on the sidelines, I cannot sense the voices as simply long ago recorded and now playing back. I wonder at first whether there are actual people there, speaking, but as I look carefully I see there are only the speakers. I begin to have the uncanny sense that the speakers have somehow taken over and are speaking themselves with an as-if-human voice. Who or what is inhabiting whom or what? Whose or what’s voices are speaking? What I find myself listening to is something more than a work about echo and repetition—perhaps more a rehearsal for a reversal—where the speakers’ own voices become the human voices that inhabit them, rather than a transparent transmitting. I feel like the RCA Victor dog in a new materialist enchanted zone. Just as the People’s Microphone in the Occupy movement plays with repetition and alters our apprehension of microphone technology, so this work disrupts my sensed understanding of speaker technology as simply communicative/transmissional. Are the speakers voicing the way they are occupied by the people, just as the People’s Microphone voices a different sort of occupation of public space?

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