Technology-assisted close listening to sound poetry vocal practices for creative musical collaboration

Abstract

As part of a sustained increase in interest in voice studies from all kinds of fields of knowledge and from a post-humanistic comprehension of voice as an assemblage, this investigation understands vocal practices as the pivot of artistic collaboration between music and sound poetry. It presents a method for analysing vocal practices in sound poetry in a creative context of artistic research in collaboration with electroacoustic music. The method involves a mixture of close listening, audio information retrieval, phonetics and morphology. It is based on a standard voice analysis of a sound poet (i.e. prepared samples) and a case-specific vocal practice (i.e. actual sound poem) with a creative rather than comparativist aim. After discussing the principle of differentiation between analysing and creating, the text offers two concrete artistic outputs of electroacoustic interventions over the vocal practice of the Uruguayan sound poet Luis Bravo’s sound poem ‘Descubrimiento del Fuego’. Finally, a set of compositive ideas based on this method are classified as either mimetic or metaphoric, according to their relationship with the obtained data. Both the concrete examples and the compositive ideas provoke unavoidable questions about current electroacoustic and vocal practices and point to discussions on voice studies about issues such as presence, virtuality, identification and materiality.