Text Sound Art - Tape Experiments with Sounds and Voices
The focus of my final year Goldsmiths University music degree, became voices. I was really intrigued by beatboxing, but the other angle was how voice interfaces with text and sound. Words are a mysterious thing. They exist in an inconcievable space between text and sound. Looking at this ‘crevice’ between text and sound, lead me to take on some creative experiments. The following experiments, like Text-Sound-Art itself, are closely related to early tape recording and editing experiments.
Scatter Pot uses a chopping technique on an audio clip from an old children’s tv show called ‘Bill and Ben’ (The Flower Pot Men). I like to think of the result as having a sort-of compound text of jibberish. As if the chopping of words leads to a new and unheard language.
Phonifesto is a sound experiment a bit like Alvin Lucier’s ‘I’m Sitting in a Room’. I recorded a manifesto on sound and music onto a phone, played this while recording it into another phone. I repeated this process back and forth several times until reaching this heavily distorted result.
Slow mending is simply an audio clip taken from an old childrens tv show and drastically slowed down. The result is so textural and warped that it becomes an entirely different sonic entity.
Emperor Ruledule and Ted Halnhai Screapclirch, are both based upon the speech from Charlie Chaplin in ‘The Great Dictator’. The first is based solely on chopping. Again, I find in the results of chopping words, a bias towards hearing words outside my vocabulary. The latter builds upon this sonically by using a turntable effect, warping the audio backward and forward.