Underground: Sculpting with Voices

This submission sits at an interface between the fields of sound design, museum/ archive studies, phonography, radio and electroacoustic music and offers insights relevant to all these fields.

Practice and scholarship intertwine in this work, each informing the other. The practice comprises an audio installation for a museum that combines recorded spoken testimony, oral history archival material and field recordings, in the creation of a fixed media, multi-channel sound work that treads a delicate line between documentary and soundscape composition.

Building upon the Radio Ballads of MacColl, Parker and Seeger (1958-64) and the ‘music-in-speech’ dialogues in Gould’s Solitude Trilogy (1967-77), Underground is distinctive in two ways. Firstly, the techniques employed in the programmes above are significantly extended by an approach to the voice critically informed by the work of Mladen Dolar and Adriana Cavarero. Secondly, influences from the world of radio have been translated into a multi-channel, site-specific context, enabling the articulation of space to become a primary compositional parameter in Underground., Audio content from the installation has been remixed and presented here as a one-hour stereo mix, first broadcast on the Concertzender radio, NL in October 2013. This CD is accompanied by two conference papers, which outline the two of the key research themes explored in the work. The first examines the role of phonography in bringing new value to the use of the human voice in documentary artworks. The second examines the potential for the audio artist working in site-specific museum contexts to articulate space with sound, building upon, and adding value to the conventions of film sound design. Underlying Underground is an investigation into what it is to approach the sound materials described above not as a historian but as an artist and as a composer.