The Elastic Voice

"Voice is the original instrument." So says Joan
La Barbara, the doyenne of extended vocal
technique. This course explores the extraordinary
panoply of purposes to which the human voice has
been deployed. While the focus is on popular
music genres of the past half-century, the course
is limned with an awareness of parallels and
precursors across 20th century avant-garde music,
jazz, and musics from outside Western traditions.
Diverse forms of vocal expression are under
consideration, but there'll be a bias towards the
experimental, the extreme, and the excessive - a
journey that will take us from the beautifully
harrowing screams of Yoko Ono and Diamanda Galas,
through the aerobatic feats of Tim Buckley and
Robert Wyatt, the rhythmic inventions of Bobby
McFerrin and human beatboxers like Rahzel.

We'll look at spectacular vocalists like Freddie
Mercury and Klaus Nomi and at eccentric singers
like Mary Margaret O'Hara and Elisabeth Fraser.
Conversely, we'll also dedicate some time to
"non-singers", artists who use the voice
rhythmically or in a recitative fashion: rappers
from Rakim to Lil Wayne, reggae modes like DJ
talkover, toasting, and "fast chat" as practiced
by performers like U Roy, Big Youth, Eek-a-Mouse,
and Smiley Culture, the MC tradition in UK rave
and pirate radio from jungle to grime, and a
lineage of postpunk speak-sing artists from Mark
E. Smith and John Cooper Clarke to Sleaford Mods
and Dry Cleaning.

As the course unfolds, the interface between the
human voice and technology will become
increasingly central, starting with devices like
vocoder and talk box (Roger Troutman, Kraftwerk),
then moving into the era of sampling cut-ups and
"vocal science" (The Art of Noise, Todd Edwards,
Daft Punk, Burial) and Auto-Tune (Future, Playboi
Carti). We'll be reckoning with the lineage of
artists who've used found vocals as raw material
for collage or reprocessing (Holger Czukay, Brian
Eno & David Byrne, Boards of Canada). Towards the
end of the semester, we'll engage with the last
decade of conceptual electronic music, where the
voice has emerged as the privileged locus for
experimentation, with female artists like Holly
Herndon, Katy Gately, and Stine Janvin leading the
way. Among the most interesting developments in
this realm is the creation of fully artificial
voices by producers like Amnesia Scanner and
Oneohtronix Point Never, although in some ways
this is just left-field electronica catching up
with the 'vocaloids" trend in Japanese pop.

While spending plenty of time on the technical or
technological aspects of all this vocal mutation
and manipulation, we will never lose sight of the
artistic and communicative purposes to which all
this experimentation is applied: what the artist
is trying to say or create, and how different
notions about the role and status of the human
voice that prevail within various music
micro-cultures frames the reception and listener
experience of these divergent vocal modes.
The goal of the course is to deepen both our
understanding of and our awe at the limitless
stretchiness of the human voice. We will confront
the paradoxes of singing: the way that ethereal,
unearthly, immaterial-seeming sounds are produced
from the physical interior of the human body
through intense exertion and discipline (whether
trained or self-taught). We'll also explore how
digital culture has dematerialized the voice
(along with everything else), turning carnal
sounds into disincarnate data that's susceptible
to remodeling and restructuring using
pitch-correction and vocal design technology like
Auto-Tune, Melodyne and Harmony Engine, to the
point where a vocal can be reassigned completely
different emotions. Terminally elasticated, the
voice has become pure posthuman Play-Doh.