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This book focuses on vocal expressions in the borderland between song and speech. It spans across several linguistic and musical milieus in societies where oral transmission of culture dominates. ‘Vocal expression’ is an alternative word for ‘song’ which is free from bias based on cultural and research-related traditions. The borderland between song and speech is a segment of the larger continuum that extends from speech to song. These vocal expressions are endangered to the same degree as the languages they represent. Perspectives derived from ethnomusicology, prosody, syntax, and semantics are combined in the research, in which performance templates serve as an analytical tool. The focus is on the techniques that make performance possible and on the transmission of these techniques. The performance templates serve to organize the vocal expression of words by combining musical and linguistic conventions. It is shown that all the cultures studied have principles for organizing these parameters; but each does this in its own unique way while meeting a number of basic needs on the part of human society, particularly communal interaction and interaction with the spirit world. A working method is developed that makes it possible to gain qualitative knowledge from a large body of material within a comparatively limited period of time.
Our research has focused on vocal expressions in the area where speaking and singing overlap. Our ultimate interest has been neither the description of performance practices nor their relation to possible ‘culture areas’, no matter how interesting these things may be, but how those principles that make vocal expressions possible are constructed. Therefore, the cultures under study have been chosen not for reasons of comparison, but for their suitability in studying the borderland between song and speech
young man, he came to Thailand and eventually to Sweden, where he became a key informant and co-worker in the ‘Kammu Language and Folklore’ project at Lund University. Most of the vocal expressions studied in this chapter were performed by him, and he also wrote about his life in his home village. Like many other mountain villages, it has been abandoned and the villagers have moved to nearby communities. 1 Children didn’t sing together with the grown-ups at parties, but in the fields
important to the young people right now. 2 Alaskan Athabascan language and vocal expressions 3 Though there are some studies of Athabascan language and music, there was very little, initially in our research, about the interrelation between the two. It was known, however, that the vocal expressions that are studied here were composed. Even though the individual compositions are formulaic to a certain extent, it was not certain whether performances would be useful in the analysis
Rebellion, which began in October 1930 and formed an uprising against the Japanese forces in Japanese Taiwan. 2 The Seediq language and vocal expressions Though there are some studies of the music of ethnic groups in Taiwan, and some of those incorporate linguistic aspects, there are very few descriptions of the music of Seediq. Our main objective has been to study vocal expressions of the form that contains repetitions of phrases, in order to see to what extent the concept of the performance
The aim of this study was to pursue greater knowledge of vocal expressions in the borderland between speech and song through collaboration between researchers with different approaches, with a view to developing an interdisciplinary method for the analysis of such expressions. The research presented here is the outcome of the research project ‘In the Borderland between Song and Speech. Vocal Expressions in Oral Cultures’ carried out in 2011–14 with support from the Swedish Research Council. The
acquire dramatic significance through their relationship to other formal elements. Still, when gestures and expressions are distinguished from characters, actors and star images, it becomes apparent that combinations of and variations in the spatial, temporal and energy qualities of filmic movements, gestures, and facial and vocal expressions prompt audiences to see when and why noir tough guys are masking their ‘true
There is no soundtrack is a specific yet expansive study of sound tactics deployed in experimental media art today. It analyses how audio and visual elements interact and produce meaning, drawing from works by contemporary media artists ranging from Chantal Akerman, to Nam June Paik, to Tanya Tagaq. It then links these analyses to discussions on silence, voice, noise, listening, the soundscape, and other key ideas in sound studies. In making these connections, the book argues that experimental media art – avant-garde film, video art, performance, installation, and hybrid forms – produces radical and new audio-visual relationships that challenge and destabilize the visually-dominated fields of art history, contemporary art criticism, cinema and media studies, and cultural studies as well as the larger area of the human sciences. This book directly addresses what sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne calls ‘visual hegemony’. It joins a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that is collectively sonifying the study of culture while defying the lack of diversity within the field by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. Therefore, the media artists discussed in this book are of interest to scholars and students who are exploring aurality in related disciplines including gender and feminist studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, urban studies, environmental analysis, and architecture. As such, There Is No Soundtrack makes meaningful connections between previously disconnected bodies of scholarship to build new, more complex and reverberating frameworks for the study of art, media, and sound.
Thailand. Akha language and the shaman’s vocal expression The words of Akha shaman performances have been studied to some extent but, to our knowledge, there has been no previous study of the relationship between the linguistic and musical aspects of the performances. It was rather obvious that the long vocal expressions, based on a fundamental recurring melodic formula and variation, would be suitable for analysis from the performance-template perspective. Since Akha is a tone language, it was also obvious that
people in the Ryukyu Islands to compose waka than ryūka , since only the older generation can speak genuine Ryukyuan, whereas the younger generation speak Japanese only. 2 Waka and ryūka The terms waka and ryūka literally mean uta , ‘song/poem’, in Japan and in the Ryukyu Islands, respectively. It was clear from previous research that the vocal expressions which result from the performance of waka and ryūka lend themselves to study as performance templates. 3 Our