The Voice in Computer Music and Its Relationship to Place, Identity, and Community
Hazel Smith · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2011
In computer music, the voice has been used to explore and problematize concepts of place, identity, and community. While the exploration of subjective and social experience through verbal content is often not as intensive in computer music as it is in song-setting or poetry, the transformation and contextualization of the voice is much more radical and multidimensional. This article is concerned with the spoken voice rather than singing, and its emphasis is cultural, interpretative, and highly selective rather than technical, taxonomic, comprehensive, or historical. It considers place, identity, and community separately, but inevitably these are all interwoven and interdependent. Electroacoustic sounds often function as multiple metaphors: a piece that can seem to be about nature, for example, but also be interpretable as a psychological landscape. In addition, many of the works function on a meta-level.