Opening
[Voicing Across Distance theme]
Masi: Hello and welcome to Voicing Across Distance. This is Episode 1: Glitch, Jiggle, and Resonance. My name is Masi Asare.
[Voicing Across Distance theme ending, with glitches]
Masi: There are 3 parts to this podcast: a reflection on voices in our time of Covid-19, a practical vocal exercise from an expert, and a reading from a theoretical text on voice. I was thinking of starting with the theory text, but I had a feeling that if I kick off with dense French philosophy, I might lose some people. So, we’ll start with a reflection on some voices I heard this past week. And then my guest voice coach for this episode is Professor Stan Brown, with a really wonderful exercise for us all. And I’ll wrap up reading a few quotes from the book Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy.
Reflection
Masi: So this is my reflection for today.
This past week I took an online dance class. I am not a good dancer, and this was a very basic level dance class, but that is not the point of this podcast, so we’ll put that to the side. The instructor was teaching from her tiny New York apartment. You could just tell from her aura, the angles of her movements, and her ageless dancer body that she was killing it in the 1970s and 80s and beyond, even though the technology of teaching this jazz class on Zoom was hard for her to navigate. She couldn’t always tell where to stand so that her feet were in the shot, the internet connection was spotty, she was teaching a class of maybe 50 students through her phone, perched pretty precariously on a shelf next to her sound system. There was an assistant on the call, who was helping her and coaching her sometimes about how to get the best Zoom angle. And she would lean in close to the camera and lift her glasses off her nose to hear better what the assistant was saying.
The whole experience gave me such a sense of loss. It was so glitchy that it was hard to know that we were together. There’s a way that I just had to be okay with being out of phase. It was such a disjunct to hear her talking through the steps while the sound of her voice was out of sync with not only her face (when her face was in the shot) but also out of sync with her moves. It was an experience of hoping to learn a dance, something that is so dependent on knowing where you are in relation to the beat...hearing someone’s voice trying to guide you through that, but confronting the fact that it just doesn’t make sense with the picture you’re seeing.
I also felt a sense of loss, not only in the gap between sound and picture, in the technological glitch, but a sense of loss for what the experience could have been, for what a class with dancer who surely had a legendary career could have been, and what it now must be. I found myself reaching, in my own way, for a different kind of comfort that I now have to be able to find, a different kind of peace that I have to be able to make with the loss of phase, the loss of syncing up. I recognized that the task now is to be okay living in the space of that gap between the voice and the dance.
Now, a few days later, I’m thinking about the way that the dance teacher’s voice was meant to call into being my very movements. As she clapped and counted out the timing while the image and audio froze and skipped, I knew that she intended for her voice to convey how my body should move.
It puts me in mind, in a kind of counterintuitive way, of some wonderful research I was fortunate to hear on the “Sound Acts” panel of the American Society for Theatre Research conference this past fall, and at a wonderful symposium called “Revolutions in Sound” at the University of Maryland that I attended right at the end of February, just before this crisis really hit here in the US. It’s work by the scholar and dancer Dr. Jade Power Sotomayor, who is on faculty at the University of San Diego. And look for her article on this topic, on “Corporeal Sounding: Listening to Bomba Dance, Listening to Puertorriquenxs,” in a forthcoming issue of the journal Performance Matters this fall.
Dr. Sotomayor’s paper pays careful attention to the practice of Puerto Rican bomba dance and music, an Afro-Caribbean performance style and means of community-building that has its own deep history and expression across diaspora. She listens really specifically to the way that a skilled female bomba dancer’s movements play the drums. As she explains so beautifully, the dancer’s movements call up, they call forth the sound of the drum. The dancer dances the drum into sound. There is a certain authority and specifically a sonic authority, that is wielded by the dancer. And many of us usually think of it the other way. That the drums call the dance forward, that it’s in response to sound that a dance happens. But, as Professor Sotomayor’s work teaches us, here, the dancer makes the sound happen.
So stay with me here, this is a little bit of a twisty-turny thought. We could think about a person who vocalizes as a kind of dancer...a person’s body must execute a whole choreography both internally and externally in order to produce voice. And, analogous to the bomba dancer, voices call up certain kinds of movements. Because it is not just the sound of the drums that the bomba dancer controls, she also authorizes a certain set of movements of the drummer’s body. And just like the dancer whose gestural call regulates the drummer’s body, the voices of some people also command other people’s bodies to behave in certain ways.
Voices exert control; they command certain kinds of bodily movements and restraint. This is about authority, vocal authority. It’s not just the content of the words but the sound of the policing “Hey, you!” on the street that makes a person turn around. Right now there are so many pronouncements we are getting from leaders. The voices that bear pronouncements and orders of “shelter in place” or “we are on pause” or “stay at home” or “stay six feet apart” or “wear a face mask” are commanding voices, and their pronouncements of vocal authority are meant to produce certain bodily effects, upon which, it is true, our lives may depend. But we may or may not feel that these commanding voices are glitchy, and that the rhythm they want our bodies to hold to can be nonsensical.
“Don’t go to work but don’t be late with your rent payment.” (Wait, how am I supposed to move?) “Stay six feet apart but no one in prisons and detention centers where this is impossible will get special treatment.” (Wait, how are our bodies, and those of our brothers and sisters, supposed to move?) “The libraries, theatres, and labs are closed but academic research should continue at the usual pace.” (Wait, am I doing this dance wrong? What’s the step? Where’s the beat?) Glitchy.
In my Zoom dance class, I felt I needed to make my peace with that glitch, that delay, the fact that the vocal command could not communicate to my body as hoped. But. I still talked back to the screen. My mic was muted, but I still grumbled, in my empty apartment, as I tried to keep pace to a rhythm that didn’t hold. Maybe I was a little bit like the man walking past the park outside my window the other day who swore loudly and extensively at Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, for having closed the parks, which meant he could not now sit on a park bench. People who seem powerless can still talk back, over, and through the glitch. We can swear at the commanding voices that regulate how and where our bodies can move even when, in the best of cases, we believe that they, the dance teachers of the state, intend to help us.
Maybe the thing to hold on to is knowing that, in the act of talking back, or laughing at the frozen screen, or cursing, I am remembering, with my voice, that I am a person with a body. The drummer who bends her hands to the beat of the dancer today might also, in a different moment, be the dancer who gives the command. In using my voice, I remember that I possess my own bodily authority and potential. Beyond the glitch.
[Music clip: Masi at a flamenco singing class]
Guest Voice Practitioner and Vocal Exercise
Masi: I’m so thrilled today to have as my guest—joining me vocally—Stan Brown, who is a very distinguished educator, actor, voice and dialect coach, vocalist, recording artist, and stage director. He worked closely with legendary voice expert Cicely Berry, who was director of the Voice Department, very famously, at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-on-Avon. Stan is also an accomplished professional actor with a career that spans theater, film, television, and radio over 30 years. He holds an MFA in Acting from the University of South Carolina and was a graduate acting fellow at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC. Stan has held academic positions at the University of Warwick and the University of South Carolina, and is now the W. Rockwell Wirtz Professor and Director of Graduate Studies of the brand-new MFA Acting Program here at Northwestern University, where I’m so very lucky to have him as a colleague.
So welcome, Stan! And thank you again.
Stan: Oh, thank you, for having me!
Masi: Yeah, I know you have a very busy schedule teaching this term, in addition to all your work as an administrative leader, so I really do appreciate your making some time to share an exercise with us. And you know, I didn’t actually get into this in our pre-conversation, but you sent me some really lovely thoughts about how you understand and think about the voice, and sort, of the bridge that it is between our interior and our exterior. And I wonder if you might want to just share a little bit about that with us before the exercise?
Stan: Oh sure, of course. Well, I’ve worked with several wonderful master teachers and mentors over the years. And so this is not an original thing, it’s just a way that I was given to understand the voice over the years. And it’s pretty much that the voice is...it’s a bridge that’s connecting sort of the ever-shifting internal and external realities, those two things that we have going on all the time. And what we would call our “identity” is always crossing that bridge. It’s become more popular in quantum physics, but...we are vibrational beings and so, although we walk around sort of as dense, solid life forms to the naked eye, we are vibrating at certain frequencies. But it is the voice that one can actually detect and measure as vibration. And so, the ear can always pick up through that vibration. And I even—you know, not just though the ear but the ear primarily—can tell how someone is, you know, sort of emotionally or energetically. And whether that’s in this moment or over the course of a lifetime, that’s sort of recorded in the voice.
Masi: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Beautiful. I love it. I have to admit though that I was a little bit mesmerized just listening to the sound of your voice explaining that just now! Because your diction is so very beautiful. But thank you, I agree, and I think one of the things we were talking about is the fact that in this time right now it’s very easy for us to feel a little bit disconnected from our bodies. You know, we’re always plugged into our screens, we’re sort of immobilized in front of Zoom or feeling kind of stuck in one place in our apartments. And so this idea of remembering that that the voice is really connected to the body, that we are beings with voices and bodies, I think is part of what I’m excited about for your exercise.
Stan: Yeah. I just worked with a student today, speaking about that...and my husband and I were talking earlier about just our sense of how boundaries are something that we put up. We don’t need to build a wall anywhere, it’s just, we’re doing that all the time. And I’ve noticed how, when I’m out now, I’ve sort of given it to myself as a mission to smile. You know, because people are tightened now, when they see each other. And even though that’s sort of a silent act, to tighten, it’s having an impact on the voice when it is ultimately used. And I was working with a student today who reminded me of something that ultimately existed before the pandemic. And that is, she lives...she has shared walls in her apartment and she was self-conscious about releasing her voice to disturb, you know, her neighbors. And I understood totally because ultimately what’s coming through the voice is so personal, until when it’s released, sometimes the person who’s actually uttering the sound is making a discovery. And one does not want to be ridiculed or punished for that release. And so there’s a trust that one wants from anybody that might be there receiving it. And so, you know, we did some things that allowed her to be able to do that with the shared walls. But anyway, I hope that makes sense.
Masi: No, it makes total sense, and I think...I love also what you’ve just said because I think there’s a way that what we might release into with our voices is about—can be a discovery, and we have to be willing and open to that discovery. And I think it’s easy to feel like we can’t, we must just be closed and closed down, like you were saying. I’ve been finding when I’m out and wearing a mask that my smile isn’t as useful as it might be. So I’ve been trying to make an effort to say hello, you know. But I think you’re absolutely right, everything we can do to make sure that we don’t just feel like we have closed into a hard, tight core.
Stan: Yes. I’ve been wanting to put a smile on my mask.
[laughter]
Masi: There you go!
Stan: I think I’m going to do that. Yeah.
Masi: I love it. Cool, well, would you lead us through your exercise now?
Stan: Sure!
Masi: Great.
Stan: This exercise I call “The Jiggle.”
Masi: Okay!
Stan: J-I-G-G-L-E. And what it...you can’t really touch the diaphragm, but this exercise gets you as close as you can. And so if one would just take the four fingers of whatever your dominant hand is, and just start to trace down the center of your chest. And that hard bone down the center of the chest is called the sternum. If you just trace that bone down to the very bottom, the ribs go out in either direction but then there’s like a soft, squishy part underneath that. And what you’re jiggling is—and I’m speaking now, so ultimately I can’t give in to the exercise, but I’ll stop in a second—but you’re going to sort of thrust in there. Now, ultimately I have two people doing this exercise, and there’s one person that’s doing the jiggling while the other person is just standing there. Because the effect is more...it’s more effective that way. I say sometimes it’s like tickling yourself, it isn’t as effective. But you can always do it by yourself. You’re taking about three fingers—everyone has a different sort of spacing down there—and then you are sort of thrusting in really [demonstrating with jiggling sound] quick...ly there and...
Masi: [also making the sound with the jiggle] Ah. Okay!
Stan: Yes, and so what happens there is it [demonstrating with the jiggle] brings the voice back down into the body. And in that moment of sort of jarring it, you have to take responsibility after you’ve jiggled the voice back down into the body. And it sort of reminds you—Oh, right, yes, I’m “in here.” Or, This is how I must ground myself in my sound. And it changes your sense of time, I find. And you were saying earlier how...and I’m doing it right now, because I’m going right back up...and how the voice can sort of travel up toward the head and the diaphragm isn’t used in the way that it is best used. There’s a bit of what’s called bracing that goes on, and so the diaphragm isn’t really sort of doming out and, you know, going in the directions where it should go. And a lot of that is about timing, feeling rushed. It could be stress, it could be fear. Babies do it as well, and so it’s not anything to sort of collapse into a humongous shame spiral over as an adult or anything. It’s just something that we do. But to remind yourself to just [making sound with the jiggle] fall back in, ahh, back into that place every now and then. And then you feel the full power of your voice from that place. And it does change your sense of time, I think, when that happens. You relax a bit. Does that make sense?
Masi: I love it! I kind of, I don’t want to ruin this with me making jiggle sounds, but I am going to practice once we are done with this. And I really appreciate that. I love it, it makes total sense. I think we all could benefit from making sure that our voices feel like they’re not stuck up in our heads but in our bodies, and that we allow ourselves the time that we need to be...to be who we want to be. To be who we need to be in order to express.
Stan: Yeah.
Masi: Oh, thank you so much, Stan!
Stan: Thank you very much as well. All the best to you.
Masi: Okay. Thanks!
[voice theory intro chant: “theory theory theory theory voice theory”]
Reading
Masi: All right! I want to read a little bit this week from the theorist Jean-Luc Nancy, specifically from the book Listening, translated by Charlotte Mandell. This was one of the very first books that I ever read that made feel scholarly work could have a real poetics to it. There was so much that I found so beautiful about this book even though it is, you know, dense and hard to understand at times. Soo I’m going to try not to over-European-philosopher you on Episode 1... I think we can do this. And I’m going to give you a little setup.
Actually, what’s so cool about sound, and vocal sound, is that it has a tendency to kind of break European philosophy, and a number of voice scholars have written on that. The ways that we’re taught that things make sense and you have to be logical about them, well, sounds and listening often interrupt those lines of logic and insist on different routes—insist on meaning that is experiential and embodied and multisensory, not dependent on these metaphors of seeing as knowing. So in this book, Nancy is tackling this question of is it possible to pay attention to what listening might mean as something different from understanding (and the French word overlaps, right? entendre as carrying meanings of both “understand” and “listen.” The word entender in Spanish is kind of like that too, right?). So what Nancy comes to, is that the act of listening is, and here’s a quote: “to be always on the edge of meaning.” So for Nancy, the act of listening requires a new way of thinking about meaning. The body becomes a space of reverberation for the echoes and returns of meaning. And what it comes down to, for him, is resonance as a way of being in the world and being by listening.
I think this is also really relevant for us now because we are listening to the news but many of us are not necessarily understanding it. So much of the news nowadways is beyond comprehension. How can we comprehend the numbers that we are given of the sick, the dead, the dying, the recovered? Perhaps these numbers can’t be comprehended by most of us, but they can be listened to (maybe not every day, for our mental health). What’s more, we can pay attention to what this act of listening means for our bodies. Our resonant bodies.
Okay. So, here are a few quotes from this book by Nancy that I love. I’m going to do two short quotes and one long quote.
First, “Music is the art of the hope for resonance.” Isn’t that amazing? “Music is the art of the hope for resonance.” (God, we all need more hope right now.) That puts me in mind of the comments from Stan Brown about how we can understand ourselves through voice as beings of vibration, vibrational beings, right? We are in this zone of resonance.
Second, from Nancy, The voice is “a rustling of [the] self.” The voice is a rustling of the self. Isn’t that incredible? If you think of how the wind rustles through the leaves, or the grass, or how you might rustle the pages of a book, the idea that the voice is a rendering of who you are in this kind of way. And what it also means is that when I hear my voice, I remember I have a self whose sound I now hear rustling.
Ok, and third, here is my long quote. You may or may not love it, so just let it wash over you. There is something here about the listener as a kind of drum, right? An idea that has an echo or a resonant return to the reflection that we opened with today. So here’s the quote.
“Timbre can be represented as the resonance of a stretched skin...and as the expansion of this resonance in the hollowed column of a drum. Isn’t the space of the listening body, in turn, just such a hollow column over which a skin is stretched, but also from which the opening of a mouth can resume and revive resonance? A blow from outside, a clamor from within, this sonorous, sonorized body undertakes a simultaneous listening to a “self” and to a “world” that are both in resonance. It becomes distressed (tightens) and it rejoices (dilates). It listens to itself becoming distressed and rejoicing, it enjoys and is distressed at this very listening where the distant resounds in the closest.
That being the case, that skin stretched over its own sonorous cavity, this belly that listens to itself and strays away in itself while listening to the world and while straying in all directions, that is not a “figure” for rhythmic timbre, but is its very pace, it is my body beaten by its sense of body, what we used to call its soul.”
[Reference: Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Fordham University Press, 2007, p. 66; p. 26; p. 42]
Closing
[Voicing Across Distance theme]
Masi: That’s it! Thanks for listening. Hope you’ll listen in next week for Episode 2, where I plan to host two more professors as guests, Neil Verma, assistant professor of sound studies in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern, to reflect with me on voices of our times; and Julie Foh, assistant professor of voice and speech at the University of Connecticut, with a vocal exercise for us all. Until then!
[Voicing Across Distance theme ending]
About this Transcript
This transcript is provided for reference purposes, and should not be taken as a literal performance score of every “mm-hmm” and “yeah”and “um” and stutter and laugh that transpired in the course of conversation. The Voicing Across Distance theme music and “Voice Theory” chant are written and performed by Masi Asare.