LE SON D’UNE VOIX

The Sound of a Voice, first performed in Warsaw in 1964 by K. Simonović, is a short essay that forms part of a more general research project, the primary conviction of which is that the deepest meaning of music consists in making a model of all real sound; the most beautiful human language, such as that of Eluard, thus has its place among all the other sounds of nature.

Commentary

Today I would no longer speak of abusive humanism, and I recognise that speech has a very special place among the sounds of nature. But it is true that it has an interest that goes far beyond the semantics of discourse, and I attribute particular importance to this second essay, which is more radical and more developed than that of Safous Mélè. It is the first work to be based entirely on the analysis of spectrograms, and as such prefigures what subsequently developed in France as a so-called spectral school.

Using my own voice and my own language as models, I was trying to descend into the individual and collective unconscious to bring back a hidden musical truth. This was perceived by some critics, such as J. Longchampt, who wrote:
“The original notice sounds a bit like a manifesto: it may be seen as a juvenile lapse as well as a deliberate effort to reach a personal truth”.
I had used the sonogram to refine my perception of the smallest details of speech. It revealed to me, among other things, the instability of vowels and the low level of consonants. I relied more on intuition when choosing a model with a high rate of repetition, assonance and anaphora: all forms of repetition outlawed by the ‘avant-garde’ at the time. I reintroduced them into my music semi-clandestinely, so to speak, before much later recognising their universal necessity.