UNCAS

A variety of digital techniques have been used to precisely transcribe intonations and rhythms, and transmute them into sound on sampler keyboards. A digital processor translates the inflections of spoken recordings into “Midi” instructions, and drives one of the samplers in real time, triggering various timbres in sync and unison with the syllables. The spoken languages, used to varying degrees, were collected both directly (ancient Armenian, Fijian, Kawi, Telugu, Eskimo) and via linguists (Dargwa, Ubykh, Abkhaz, Cheremis, Lude).

Comment

The death of languages is not just a semantic impoverishment, depriving humanity of a particular interpretation of the world. It is also a musical impoverishment, for it deprives us of a phonetic and intonational system that is comparable to at least potential music. In Werner Herzog’s beautiful 1971 film “The Land Where Green Ants Dream”, one of the Aborigines, who is the last survivor of his tribe, and whose language will die with him, is no longer understood by anyone, pleads in a long monologue before judges mute with shame. At times, I felt very close to this Aborigine.
But I’m a European, who can only transmute nostalgic temptation and regret into exploration of the future, with all the techniques available. Here I used a Voicetracker, a digital processor that had just been created by Fairlight. It analyzed in real time the average pitch of each syllable of a tape-recorded speech, and sent the corresponding Midi note to a sampler. Another sampler, controlled by a Midi keyboard, functioned as one of several instruments. Both samplers were originally Mirages, the first model to be marketed. Each timbre change was triggered manually, both on the one driven by the Voicetracker and on the other. Then I had to adapt the sounds to an Akaï S900, then an S1000, then an S3000. Then came the time of faster, more powerful computers, offering virtual samplers, such as MachFive, which is a program tending to oust stand-alone samplers like the Akai, now hard to find.
As ever, the longevity of each device has proved rather short, and if the technological race continues, it is increasingly likely to discourage some of the runners.
Among the languages recorded for musical use, Eskimo is for me a memory that prompts less pessimism than others. Robert Umerineg, a hunter from Angmassalik on the east coast of Greenland, had been called to Paris by the Musée de l’Homme to repair the ummiak, a large canoe in his collection. I took advantage of this stay to invite him to my home, accompanied by an ethnologist who was acting as interpreter, and he kindly recorded enumerations and hunting stories, where I was merely looking for a spontaneous use of his language. It turns out that, although endangered, this language and this people still have a remarkable vitality. Perhaps they will succeed in exploiting the advantages of the “Western” world without losing their soul.
In contrast to the gentle sonority of this language from a country where sounds are muffled by the snowy mantle, Caucasian Dargwa is abrupt and sonorous, and is apt to spread from one summit to another. Not having travelled to any of the regions from which my spoken sequences originated – except for Kawi, the ancient language of Bali – I based my imagination solely on the phonetic features of the speakers recorded in my collection, but it’s relatively easy to distinguish individual features, and to glimpse the music of a language beyond their particularities.
After highlighting in unison the remarkable inflections of Tchérémisse or Kawi, the end of the work breaks away from “natural” language to fragment it, scattering spoken segments like so many motifs, superimposing them in the hubbub of imaginary crowds, and finally reducing them to almost animal-like babblings or chirps, without it being possible to decide whether this disintegration of discourse signifies a kind of triumph of music or a kind of shipwreck of communication alongside the death of language.