Among the many things the twentieth century has left us as a legacy, with its way of distorting, overturning and revolutionizing the tradition of European music, the unintelligible voice has perhaps been one of the broadest and most pervasive themes, able to cut in different ways across a hundred years of history and very different artistic contexts, from the avant-gardes and the most rigorous composers all the way to the practices of more or less pop groups.
But what do we mean by "unintelligible voice"? In our case we are talking about a voice that chooses not to make itself comprehensible in terms of the signifying word, and that finds its own object of research in this choice. A voice that stops conveying linguistic content in order to become, itself, the content; an autonomous material with its own syntax and a specific way of communicating something.
When a composer, a poet or a singer stops saying with the voice, they are not regressing toward a primitive or infantile pre-language: they are opening a field of knowledge that Western song and the cultural construction built on the signifying word had left uncultivated. The unintelligible voice is not a mutilated version of the intelligible one, but something else.
A possible starting point for this story is found, as so often, in the action that the historical avant-gardes carried out in abandoning verbal meaning in favor of the immediacy of the signifier and a questioning of the word. In Italy, the Futurist earthquake sees in the publication of "Zang Tumb Tumb" by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1914) a first seed of the destructuring of language as the rigid composition of a cultural grammar. But, alongside the musical attempt carried out by Luigi Russolo in his "Arte dei rumori" (1913), the Italian avant-gardists concentrate more on a remodulation of existing cultural structures than on a revolution of meaning. In Switzerland, by contrast, the Dadaists of the Cabaret Voltaire present more radical forms of emptying out meaning. The performative actions of Tristan Tzara (see "Karawame," 1917) or of Kurt Schwitters, with the less talked-about "Ursonate" (1922)
\-a sonata for invented phonemes-, forcefully assert the avant-garde attempt to untie the voice from verbal semantics in order to find its own grammar, based on rhythm, timbre and formal construction.
Following this intuition, we find an exemplary realization of it in the collaboration between the composer Luciano Berio and the vocalist Cathy Berberian, for whom Berio composed in 1965 "Sequenza III – for voice," whose score presents a series of actions for the performer -laughter, murmurs, whispers, fragments of words- organized on a score that indicates emotional states rather than pitches. In a similar way Berberian herself composed in 1966 "Stripsody," in which she extends this logic to the comic strip, making the voice a sonic iconographic repertoire. Stripsody does something apparently light but theoretically decisive: it takes the onomatopoeias of the American comic book — bang, gulp, zzzzz — and treats them as compositional material that is already abstract, already ready-made. Mass culture, Berberian intuits, continually produces non-linguistic phonemes; all you have to do is recognize them and give them a form.
In parallel to this, in France an attempt is made to shift the discourse from performance or written composition to tape recording with Henri Chopin, perhaps the most radical and exemplary exponent of the European sound poetry movement of the postwar period. Brought close to the mouth — indeed, literally pushed inside the mouth — the microphone reveals a sonic universe that the naked ear had never been able to hear. Saliva, tongue against palate, swallowing, breath, micro-noises of the larynx: everything that phonetics had considered accessory or disturbing becomes, in Chopin, primary material. His audiopoèmes are built by layering vocal tracks recorded at different speeds, manipulated, edited: the voice is no longer performed, it is fabricated in the studio, like a sound object in every respect.
The theoretical leap with respect to Schwitters and Berberian is considerable. In "Ursonate" the phoneme is still a single unit, abstract and repeatable by any performer willing to study it. In "Sequenza III" it is an action codified on a score. In Chopin the phoneme goes back to being what it physiologically is: an unrepeatable event of the body. Recording allows us, for the first time, to look at it closely, to dissect it, to multiply it. The unintelligible voice ceases to be abstract linguistic material and becomes flesh again. In parallel with Chopin, between the 1950s and the 1970s, the germ of sound poetry spread across Europe, developing practices and leaving us testimonies, traces of which can be found in an extensive collection compiled by Arrigo Lora Totino in the 7-record box set "Futura: Poesia Sonora" released by Cramps in 1978.
While in Europe these paths on non-verbal vocality arise from a crisis of language or from the search for new sonic materials, in the same period in Japan related practices take hold, born from performative research and from a phenomenological approach to sound.
In the postwar period Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno become the promoters of Butoh Theater, in which -unlike the emptying out of the meaning of the word enacted by Westerners- the work is on the body as an organic totality, where the voice emerges as a pre-verbal sound, often as a strangled cry, a death rattle or an amplified breath. The voice in Butoh is not abstract, but rather a physical presence; unlike Chopin, however, who identifies in the body the "factory of sounds," in Japan the body is itself the sound, in a holistic vision where voice and gesture are inseparable.
In more strictly musical contexts, the contribution of Group Ongaku is instead exemplary, probably the most famous Japanese exponents of the Fluxus movement, which chronologically precedes European experiences of free improvisation such as Nuova Consonanza or AMM. In their recordings, perhaps for the first time, the vocal element loses its anthropocentric privilege as a prominent element, being relegated to one element of the musical discourse, on the same level as canonical instruments or objects, opening a fundamental path for what would become the Asian improvisation and noise scene.
Research in Japanese experimentation thus strips the voice of its ontological privilege to make it simply one sonic event among other events in a democratic acoustic ecosystem. In Butoh performances, in Ongaku's improvisations and in the Fluxus performances of Takehisa Kosugi (founding member of Group Ongaku), Japanese practices operate an inversion with respect to Chopin's research: if the French poet pushes the microphone into the mouth to explore the internal universe of the human body, these artists bring the human body into the external universe in order to dissolve the voice there.
This perspective has deep roots in Japanese culture, where the distinction between human and non-human is often more fluid than in the West. The concept of "ma" (間) - the space between things, the significant interval - applied to the voice means that the vocal sound acquires meaning not in itself, but in its relationship with silence and with the other sounds that surround it.
In this sense, the voice becomes "more-than-human," not because it is superhuman or divine, but because it ceases to be the exclusive property of the human and becomes the property of the sonic ecosystem as a whole. The voice is no longer what man produces, but what happens when a body (human, animal, vegetable, mechanical) vibrates in relation to other bodies.
The path that leads from the historical avant-gardes to the experiments of the second half of the twentieth century thus hands us not one but many genealogies of the unintelligible voice: the European one of the destructured word and the dissected sonic flesh; the Japanese one of the body-voice dissolved in the ecosystem; and infinite variants born from the encounter and contamination of these approaches.
What perhaps unites all these experiences, beyond cultural and philosophical differences, is the refusal to consider the voice as a transparent instrument of communication, preferring to explore it as an opaque territory of research. The voice stops being a means and becomes an end.
Today this legacy has multiplied and been democratized. The technologies that were avant-garde for Chopin have become accessible to everyone, radical improvisation and performance have been digested and historicized, and today the use of non-verbal vocality has penetrated beyond the circles of pure experimentation, ending up even in pop productions, from the cases of the most extreme hardcore -such as grindcore- to the slurred autotuned vocalizations of the most contemporary drifts of hip hop.
It is precisely this capillary and transversal diffusion that questions us today: what does it mean to practice the unintelligible voice in the era of its apparent normalization? How are these researches transformed when they are absorbed by pop culture? What new frontiers open up with contemporary technologies?
In a forthcoming piece, we will try to investigate these aspects, in dialogue with those who include them in their own practices.
Participatory sound installation. Find details and ways to take part in the opening event on Instagram.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →