Letting the words of the text happen to you

“Essentially, “work on the text” means letting the words of the text happen to you; finding ways to let the text impregnate you so that sensory, emotional, imaginative, physical and vocal discoveries are the foundation on which the intellect can build. This in turn becomes the foundation on which the speech, the scene, the character and the play are built.”

(page 191)

Kristin Linklater, Freeing the Natural Voice. New York: Drama Publishers, 1976.

Borrowed from the library of the Universität der Künste, Berlin, and from the Bibliothèques de Montréal, succursale Mile End.

Oscillating, transitory and free

“The spoken word is oscillating, transitory and free to move on the waves of sound. Sound waves actively affect the body that generates them and varying parts of the body that receives them. The printed word is static, permanent, trapped in time and space by the letters of the alphabet.”

[…]

“With a text we must tackle the accumulated sense that those words make through their various juxtapositions.”

[…]

“The first stage of work on a new text should be slow, meditative, sensory, unintellectual.”

(page 187)

Kristin Linklater, Freeing the Natural Voice. New York: Drama Publishers, 1976.

Borrowed from the library of the Universität der Künste, Berlin, and from the Bibliothèques de Montréal, succursale Mile End.

Speech almost without words

“Dialogue launches language, the mind, but once it is launched we develop a new power, “inner speech,” and it is this that is indispensable for our further development, our thinking. “Inner speech,” says [Lev] Vygotsky, “is speech almost without words…it is not the interior aspect of external speech, it is a function in itself…While in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings.” We start with dialogue, with language that is external and social, but then to think, to become ourselves, we have to move to a monologue, to inner speech. Inner speech is essentially solitary, and it is profoundly mysterious, as unknown to science, Vygotsky writes, as “the other side of the moon.” “We are our language,” it is often said; but our real language, our real identity, lies in inner speech, in that ceaseless stream and generation of meaning that constitutes the individual mind. It is through inner speech that the child develops his own concepts and meanings; it is through inner speech that he achieves his own identity; it is through inner speech, finally, that he constructs his own world.”

(page 72-73)

Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

A natural stenography that would smash the distinction between orality and literacy

“[Inventor Leon Scott] was interested in using the phonautograph [an early means of recording sound] generally to make sounds visible to the eye and specifically to create a form of automatic sound writing. This quest is something of an obsession in nineteenth-century science, and the phonautograph appeared in the middle of a much longer history. Certainly, one could argue that writing and musical notation are attempts to visualize sound that stretch back centuries. But these writing systems bear a largely arbitrary relation to the sounds that correspond to them. The same could be said for pictorial representations of sound.

[…]

Over the course of the nineteenth century there emerged another kind of visual representation of sound. To use the language of C.S Peirce, these were “indexical” images of sound, where the sound bears some kind of causal relation to the image itself (and, therefore, the image does not have a wholly arbitrary relation to the sound that conditioned it.) These images were artifacts of devices that could be affected by sound and thereby create images ordered in part by sonic phenomena. The use of these devices reflected an emergent interest in the scientific use of graphic demonstration and automatic inscription instruments, a practice that developed slowly in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and did not become prevalent until the nineteenth centure. Graphs, and later automatic recording devices, represented to their users a new kind of scientific “natural language”, where images would reveal relations hitherto unavailable to the senses. Attempts to represent sound visually were themselves artifacts of a larger process through which sound was isolated as a phenomenon and by means of which it would become an object of theoretical and practical knowledge in its own right. In fact, modern acoustics was very much shaped by this reliance on automatic imaging devices and the assumptions that this reliance embodied.

Attempts to visualize sound thus coincided with the construction of sound as an object of knowledge in its right: where speech, music, and other human sounds were reduced to special categories of noises that could be studied by the sciences of sound. In acoustics, frequencies and waves took precedence over any particular meaning that they might have in human life: “Frequencies remain[ed] frequencies regardless of their respective carrier medium.”

[…]

Visualizing sound as a species of vibration was a central task of the new science of acoustics. Visual sound had a symbiotic relation with quantification. Sound had, according to the accepted techniques of science, to be seen in order to be quantified, measured, and recorded; at the same time, some quantified and abstracted notion of sound had to be already in place for its visibility to have any scientific meaning. Again the product is an artifact of the process: visual sound required the simultaneous construction of sound as a discrete object of knowledge.

[…] Scott maintained a monomaniacal emphasis on writing as the aid to preservation and recall. It was because the phonautograph wrote that it would be able to preserve instantaneously and thus aid in recall. Scott sought to produce a “natural stenography” that would smash the distinction between orality and literacy because sound could literally write itself – hearing and speaking would become equivalent to reading and writing.”

(pages 41-45, excerpted)

Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past. TK 7881.4 .S733 2003

Found on the new acquisitions shelf in the ECU library.

To re-establish the common ground

“In oral, direct communication, we have a comprehensive repertoire of signs at our disposal to agree on the actual status of the common ground used mutually to inform one another whether the flow of conversation can be continued or whether ‘repair measures’ must be undertaken to re-establish the common ground. This is done by changing emphasis, by using assertive terms like ‘ugh’, ‘yeah’, by repeating parts of phrases while changing the accent to a question or exclamation mark, by making speech pauses, and by varying the length of our verbalizations until we signal that we expect the other person to take a turn.”

(pages 122-123)

Rainer Bromme, “Beyond One’s Own Perspective: The Psychology of Cognitive Interdisciplinarity.” in Practicing Interdisciplinarity. Eds. Peter Weingart and Nico Stehr.

Borrowed from my mother.

I wonder what the equivalents to backchannel cues (these ums, yeahs, nods, language mirroring, etc) could be in nondirect interactions, and nonverbal ones. Can we interact with a written work in such a way? Perhaps in writing notes in the margin, by going outside the text to look something up and then returning to it, by discussing it in common with others, we can maintain a flow of communication with ourselves, assuring ourselves that yes we get it, no it’s unclear, this needs more elaboration. It allows us to engage more fully in the text – and it recentres us to hear the sound of our own voice while we think. The absence of that reassuring echo is what makes us speak so loudly into cellphones. Um, yeah, nod.

What, if any, of this dialogue can be held between the viewer and the work of art?