Recorded Speech and Virtual Collaboration in Jacob TV’s “Billie”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Throughout Western music from the 1960s until today, there is a peculiar phenomenon: musical works in which the music is organized around audio recordings of the speaking voice. This article explores the role of the recorded speaker as a virtual collaborator—distanced by time and space—in creating the structure of the musical work. Both the speaker and the composer are agents in the creation of musical works for recorded speech. The speaker provides emotional expression, linguistic meaning, and a sense of embodied sound, a human focal point for the listener. The composer builds on the sonic resources provided by the speaker and adds musical frameworks that provide additional structure for the vocal utterances, reinforcing the linguistic meaning of the speech and transforming it into a structural feature of the music. Both the speaker and the composer contribute to the resulting musical work, and as such authorship is as distributed between these two agents. To illustrate this point, this article analyzes Jacob TV’s 2003 work “Billie” for saxophone and backing track, which is built around the speaking and singing voice of Billie Holiday. In doing so, the ethical tensions of the composer using an unknowing subject’s voice are considered.