Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice (review)

When one thinks of a composer, one generally thinks of music or some other sonic form. Rarely does one think of the sonic qualities of the spoken word. But, as Cathy Lane, co-director of Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) at the University of the Arts, London, notes, there is a broad and deep body of work undertaken in this area by John Cage, William S. Burroughs, François Dufrêne, Kurt Schwitters and Henri Chopin—and other sound poets, text sound artists, composers and verbal experimenters.

Where once such work was undertaken in relative isolation, there is now an interconnected and well-established community who freely share ideas and inspiration. Many of these contemporary practitioners are included in Lane's edited volume Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice. Each has been asked to engage with the motivating ideas and artistic concerns that inform their work, and how to translate the elusive qualities of their work with sound into the fixed medium of print.

This, of course, is a problem. The sonic ephemeral does not always easily, or effectively, translate, or migrate, into the fixed state of print. And despite Lane's detailed explanation about the various experimental methods used by the contributors to describe the "sounds heard, used, produced or even unheard except in the imaginings of the 'mind's ear'" (p. 9), the end result, although creative, is, ultimately, visual-textual descriptions of sounds, not the actual aural artifacts themselves.

One of Lane's contributors, composer, performer and poet Jaap Blonk, notes the irony in his essay, "Sound," when he writes that "[h]earing is everywhere. And it knocks at every window of your cochlea. . . . You hear! You hear, you hear sound! Sound" (pp. 32, 33). But we only read the representations of sound.

Still, as Lane notes in the introduction, there is a social, cultural and political power in words, as there is the opportunity for "artistic intervention" to bridge the gaps between the semantic and abstract components of words (10). This notion of power becomes a central theme of the collection.

For example, Ansuman Biswas draws inspiration for his work from Mohandas Karamchand Ghandi, whose teachings speak to the attribute in the human spirit that restricts us to the use and service of the immediate surroundings rather than the remote. Viewing the human voice as an example of technology most available at the local level, Biswas says, "I love the immediacy and constant availability of the voice" (p. 46). Where Biswas feels writing is an invaluable aid to memory "but . . . can also be misleading" (p. 45), Joan La Barbara describes how she begins her composition of music with stream-of-consciousness writing, listing all the words she can determine as possible inspiration for the new composition. For La Barbara, writing is the basis for sound. In addition to words, her notebooks also include graphic shapes to help her visualize the energy of a particular sound, or the mood of a section. The combination of words and imagery helps her "transmit a more precise sense of the trajectory, energy, and delivery of the sound" and allows listeners to re-create her sonic idea in their own minds (p. 56).

Composer Trevor Wishart notes the "richness and complexity of everyday sounds," especially those associated with the human voice, and says, "The voice connects with so many things. When we speak we not only convey meanings but we portray things about ourselves, simple things like what gender we are or whether we are ill or healthy, but also, perhaps, what our intentions are, what our mood is" (p. 71). These qualities of individuality that come through one's voice promote both the capture of the individual quality of voice as well as its abstraction. As a result, new information is available.

For John Wynne, a sound artist who works with the click languages of the Kalahari Desert, language is...