Next semester, assuming Virginia's state universities are still financially solvent, I'll be teaching Writing for Artists in the Interarts Department at George Mason University. The course has been so successful that Claire MacDonald, who designed it, is now in the process of staffing multiple sections. That's where I come in. AVT 395 was offered to me as a temp job, one attractive enough to lure me out of adjunct semi-retirement (I've been working on the diss. full time for the past year). It's a fabulous course, but don't take my word for it: check out Claire's syllabus for yourself.
As an initial assignment, Claire has her students do a Burroughs cut-up. I plan on following her lead, perhaps pairing the cut-up with an Oulipian exercise to contrast the two modes of literary creation: aleatory (Burroughs in the tradition of Dadaism and Surrealism) and algorithmic (the Oulipians, self-consciously renouncing surrealist games of chance). But I've also been toying with updating the cut-up for a new generation of technology-savvy students. How might I port the exercise into the twenty-first century? What are its possible extensions or variations?
Oddly enough, I'm tempted to take a page from Scott Rettberg's interview with Jason Nelson last month. Because it was transcribed with Dragon Naturally Speaking's notoriously buggy voice recognition software, the interview reads a lot like a cut-up. When I first saw it, I was reminded of a random text that the software once generated when I left my microphone on overnight with the Dragon window open. I still don't know how to account for it: was Dragon transcribing ambient noise, purging its memory banks, or channeling the ghost in the machine? Whatever the explanation, computational or occult, I've been unable to duplicate the results.
What is abundantly clear, though, after further experimentation, is that Dragon--at least the older versions of it--interprets everything within its auditory range as human speech: the crumpling of paper, the repeated thump of a shoe or hammer, the opening or closing of a book, the drumming of fingers on a table. In Dragon's Looking Glass world, inanimate objects speak in tongues; cups, saucers, hammers, and styrofoam are endowed with the gift of speech; and the babble of a brook is literal, not metaphorical. It's personification (and heteroglossia) taken to an extreme. It strikes me that this peculiar propensity for hearing the cacophony of voices in anything capable of generating friction has potential artistic application. I think of the sounds of a painting or etching or collage coming into being: fresh paint slapped with the flick of the brush onto taut canvas, acid eating away at a metal plate, paper torn and cut and pasted. Filtered through Dragon, these sonic waves become the choral voices of the atelier.
I can imagine a two-part exercise. Part I would require students to describe the acoustics of their work space in essay form. What does the dark room sound like? The sculptor's studio? the printer's workshop? The computer lab? Is it possible to impart an idea of one's artistry by channeling the experience through a single sensory modality? Part II would consist of Dragon's phoeneticized transcription of those sounds, that space: the glossolalia of artistic expression. The assignment would be a hybrid of sorts, part surrealist or Dadaist in its incorporation of chance procedures, part ekphrastic in its synaesthetic co-mingling of visual and verbal stimuli.
Would the experiment be more interesting if there were some predictability to the results, i.e., if, for instance, analog brush strokes were consistently rendered by Dragon as fricatives, digital processes (hammering or pounding or stippling) as stops? My own thinking is no, that the quest for purposeful agency misses the point, which is to situate the transcriptions within the history of aleatory art. The idea is to embrace rather than eschew chance and indeterminacy. My touchstones are Cozens, automatic writing, and Surrealism, not Pope, Rationalism, and Raymond Queneau. (For a superb thumbnail history of chance art, see the entry by that name in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas.)
That said, a trial run did reveal some hidden purpose. Coloring a plastic plate with swift, consistent marker strokes, I obtained the following text, notable for its repetitiveness:
With the bus to distance business assistance assistance with the only if the Pentagon and I think about that the think about that did it did that it with the submitted to think that the independent and that defendant at that it with the independent independent attempt to that defendant at the event of the equipment
*********************
I may or may not end up incorporating these nascent ideas in the classroom (how do I make Dragon available to fifteen or so students without violating IP law or asking them to shell out dollars they don't have?). But as a concept, the project has led me to some interesting finds. In the process of browsing for keyphrases like "voices of objects" or some such, I stumbled across an emergent field of research of which I was wholly unaware: archeoacoustics, also known as paleoacoustics. It's a bracing reminder of why I'm a textual critic, committed to the study of the transmission of information through time and space. The idea behind paleoacoustics--that sound waves are sometimes inadvertently recorded in artifacts--is in itself disarmingly simple; it's the playback that still proves elusive. Imagine a potter of antiquity at his wheel, singing, uttering oaths perhaps, or reciting Homeric verse. Those notes, those expletives or meters, it turns out, are durable media that may have survived in the grooves of the clay pot, like sound on vinyl. The question then becomes one of retreival.
The task of paleoacoustics is to restore the tongue of Keats' unravished bride of quietness; to make that cold, silent urn speak again.
Read about paleoacoustics here, here, and here. (And on a tangentially related note, don't miss Digital Needle: A Virtual Gramaphone).
That bit about "bus assistance" produced while colouring a plastic plate reminds me of Stein's Tender Buttons and other verbal experiments in making words things.
A multimedia dialogue of the dead was realized a few years ago... an encounter between Cage and Bouroughs... where cut up is translated as rule-based obliteration thanks to photoediting software and an aleatory ballet composition is constructed out of a small repertoire of sounds thanks to animation software.
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/portfolio/generique.dcr
In the low tech setting, similar effects can be produced with text editing software... dropping every nth letter and reading the result aloud. Or the Pig Latin approach of adding syllables at regular or random intervals.
Many thanks for the link, Francois. I'll add it to the course weblog. Very interesting.
And thanks, too, for reminding me of Tender Buttons . . .
That sounds like quite a nifty teaching opportunity, Kari, and I'm sure you have plenty of stuff to dust off from your trunk of Eastman day's tricks.
Paleoacoustics: for further precedent, check out John Picker's discussion of Babbage's _Ninth Bridgewater Treatise_ in _Victorian Soundscapes_. Me, I more interested in almost the opposite, using language or message as a means to investigate the "wash" from which the paleoacoustologist is trying to extract a tongue (though readers of Pynchon's V, knows what extracting the tongue of the atmosphere gets you). I've mentioned Alvin Luciers "I am Sitting in a Room" before when you mentioned Burroughs, and the Burroughs and Lucier are hard to separate in my mind now as I'm writing on them, Beckett, and Steve Reich, as contemporaneous producers of competing and sympathetic recorded sound aesthetics. You can find a score for Lucier here:
http://homestudio.thing.net/revue/content/lucier3.htm
Interesting project.
If you are not able to come up with licenses for all your folks, you might check out open source speech recognition projects. (A quick look doesn't seem promising.)
However, you could come up with your own method. Perhaps with the "mostly" complete open source tools, or simply applying your own alogrithm to the sounds.
The Lucier is _fascinating_, Marty--thanks for the link. And Matt just recalled Pinker from the UMD library; I've been wanting to get my hands on a copy for a while.
If you dug the Lucier, Steve Reich is the other classic of audio taped voice manipulations, with different ends. Reich includes taped voice with a few of his more conventionally orchestrated compositions, but "It's Going to Rain" and "Come Out" are the ones that are strictly done with tape splicing a looping. I don't think scores of them of any sort were ever published, though Reich has written good notes on them in a number of places. If you're library has a good a music section, they should have at least one of Reich's "works" CDs which should have either "Rain" or "Come Out".
Not sure if there is as much creative pedagogical possibilities in Reich as there is in Lucier. I think it would probably require a foray into musical composition theory most of us with primary training in print don't possess.
Thought of you when I came across this citation in an otherwise not too remarkable source:
Devereux P. _Stone Age Soundtracks: The Accoustic Archaeology of Ancient Sites_ London: Vega. 2001.
Many thanks, MP. I just read a short story on paleoacoustics by SF writer Gregory Benford ("Time Shards"). Really unsatisfying. He gives a fictionalized account of a scientist who manages with much sweat of the brow to recover voices from a clay urn, discovers from that recording that Anglo Saxon potters themselves guessed the acoustic secrets of their art, and then concludes that it's all kind of boring--or rather that the kind of content we choose to record for posterity is destined to be quotidian to a fault, leaving our descendents asking "So What?" And that's the narrative arc of the story: mad scientist lives in a state of penury most of his life pursuing a monomaniacal pipedream, finally realizes that dream, and then inexplicably turns blase, shrugging off the accomplishment. Huh?