The Recorded Voice and the Mediated Body in Contemporary Canadian Electroacoustic Music

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once declared: “the human voice is the organ of the soul.” As a powerful signifier, with deep links to human presence, the voice can indicate psychological, emotional and physical states. In the works of contemporary Canadian electroacoustic composers Christian Calon, Robert Normandeau, Tanya Tagaq, Barry Truax, and Hildegard Westerkamp, the mutability of the recorded voice initiates an aesthetic process that constructs this human presence and expresses the composer’s own preoccupation with the body, namely the ageing, social, and erotic (homosexual and heterosexual) body. Through an application of research on electroacoustics, studio technology, gender, sexuality, linguistics, epistemology, and human physiology, I examine how specific works incorporate and modify the voice, and thus construct or conceal its physical origin (i.e., the body); I consider how composers variously highlight, re-construct, or even disentangle the expressive and communicative associations between the voice and the body. Rather than summarize numerous electroacoustic works, this dissertation focuses on the aesthetic, technological, and expressive elements of a small number of contemporary Canadian electroacoustic works. I first examine Normandeau’s Onomatopoeias cycle as an artistic exploration of the ageing process that considers both emotional and physical aspects specific to certain developmental stages, including childhood, adolescence, and old age, all with a lens of ironic nostalgia. Next I explore social and sensuous relationships, the unseen interactions between bodies as heard through the recorded voices in Barry Truax’s homoerotic Song of Songs (1992) and Tanya Tagaq’s two studio albums, Sinaa (2005) and Auk/Blood (2008). Finally, I consider how the voice is employed as a vehicle for storytelling and constructing identity in Christian Calon’s Minuit (1989) and Hildegard Westerkamp’s Für Dich – For You (2005) and MotherVoiceTalk (2008). The works are varied, but from the young girl in Éclats de voix (the first work in Normandeau’s Onomatopoeias cycle [1991-2009]) to the grown child and her elderly mother in MotherVoiceTalk, they find a link in human experience.Ph