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Noise and the Voice: exploring the thresholds of vocal transgression

This text examines vocal artistic noise practice as a performed act of transgression. It explores questions of otherness, of uniqueness and individuality, of revelation of the natural and the performance of the unnatural, and of noise as a decentering, deterritorializing act. The chapter aims to establish what the thresholds of vocal noise might be. It begins with an examination of Antonin Artaud’s Les malades et les médecins (1946) as an example of a crossing of the transgressive barrier and goes on to examine how and why this sense of transgression is created through analysis of the work of improvisers including Phil Minton, Ami Yoshida, Ute Wasserman, and Valeri Scherstjanoi, the performance artists Ulay & Abramovic, the sound poetry of the Four Horsemen and their earlier ‘megapneume’ predecessor Gil J Wolman, and the rock subgenre of ‘pig squeal’. In each case the chapter attempts to localise the transgressive moment as the defining feature of vocal noise, including examination of bodily limits and physical pain, performed otherness, and the scrambling of linguistic codes, what Marie Thompson calls the ‘musicalisation of indiscernability’. Crucially, the chapter argues that vocal noise is transgressive through its erasure of vocal uniqueness: vocal noise largely eliminates the individual identifiability of the voice, severing the voice from the Self, in both ‘authentic’ and ‘staged’ forms. This definition of vocal noise provides an important alternative to existing noise definitions, which are generally inadequate for defining the boundaries of noise in the voice. The chapter is published in Cassidy, A., Einbond, E., Noise In And As Music, University of Huddersfield Press, 2013, the companion book to the ‘Noise In And As Music’ symposium, CeReNeM, University of Huddersfield, 4-6 October 2013.