I enjoy thinking about power structures as they are conveyed and even constructed by speakers of a language. This comes down to a lot of listening not only to what people say, but how they say it and, even further, how they use their voices. It’s a bit like watching body language (I also make a pastime out of that): words only tell a part of the story.

A feature of how power is communicated is how we represent others in our own speech, as in how you use your voice in quoting someone else. You'll probably find that you have a generic female and male voice for the average person and several voices for the person closest to you. All of these voices you use in different ways for different purposes. But you probably also have a range of voices for foreigners. Often it plays innocently on the novel features of their native language. No big deal, right?

But it’s my contention that the nature of that voice may also indicate your impression of the nation / tribe /group of people that foreign would represent. And not in a good way.

Take German, for example.

It seems to be a running gag, at least among English speakers, to pronounce any word in the German language forcefully, even angrily; indeed, it’s common knowledge that German is a harsh language spoken by harsh people in harsh lands. One might even say that aggression is an inherent feature of the language via its morphemes: a blitz of mashed-up consonants thundering from the back of the throat amplified by a combative tone and obscene volume. Wrap any English word---love, beauty, humility, peace---in our rendition of the German accent and the word sounds pretty much like its opposite. Toss it in any conversation and it'll always get the laugh. Throw it in a speech about the loss of First Amendment rights and it will silence the room. Boy, howdy, imagine if we were like them fascism-loving Germans!!

Well, this is a putrid pile of horse shit. German is no less beautiful than any other language and its people no more warlike or impolite than any other people. The pretext for the gag is old-hat and constitutes to my mind a subtle form of nationalism (“we” kicked their asses, after all) and certainly an overt form of bigotry. And we've probably all done it or laughed at the jackass doing it at one time or another.

At least two reasons explain why it’s always, gosh, such a laugh to hear someone scream Schmetterling (butterfly) as if it’s a battle cry.

The first is a general concern: bad teachers of German, well, of nearly any language. They allow their students to take shortcuts on pronunciation and, in so doing, cultivate an ambivalence in the student toward the very essence of the thing they are learning:language, i.e. sounds, vocal gestures, meaning conveyed above and beyond the semantics of sentences. The students grow up and think of how difficult German was back in the day and replace their frustration of learning a foreign language with ridicule of how banal that language was to begin with.

Because making fun of something, as we all know, excuses us from having to learn or respect it.

The second, and particular for the case of German, stems from our rather sickening fascination with the Third Reich. Along with the endless variation of imagery of Nazi soldiers harassing emaciated Jews huddled in some gray setting, we hear them barking this mad and vicious tongue. Over and over and over again, the vicious German language, screaming across an innocent and ravaged Europe. A vicious language for a vicious people, a people responsible for every crime against humanity humanity has created for itself and not at all like “our” heroic dead who, with their soft consonants and demure intonation, humanely and justly liberated all of Europe from this unprecedented military and cultural aggression.

Note my sarcasm.

It’s no longer acceptable to impersonate Black people with what we may call the "slave intonation" because it is a blatant attempt to associate a Black person with impoverishment, servility, stupidity even. But it is totally cool to have a few laughs over the ole "Nazi intonation," ya know, because even if German speakers aren’t Nazis per se, there is something intrinsically Nazi about them. Same thing goes for those stuck-up and effeminate French, the low class and stuttering Latinos, the 7-11 staffing Indians, the dry cleaning owning Chinese, and the swishy and immoral gays, lisping and sing-songing our good Christian nation straight to the fires of Hell.

Note once more my sarcasm.

I’m not saying it’s necessarily the case that the standard impersonations of these foreign prosodic features (intonations and other sound features) carry with them the prejudices I note here, but use of such prosody certainly does not dispel the possibility of a speaker’s agreement with these feelings.  

It’s interesting (to me, at least) how these things are structured- what's acceptable to whom in what setting, what you can get away with and what you don't have to because everyone is cool with it though it’s just as f'd up as trying to get laughs out of displaying the bigotry we all recognize as bigotry.

Tschüssi.  

 

        

Came across the video below featuring sound designer Frank Serafine earlier today. While I have my doubts about his claim concerning human DNA and sound (did someone say hyperbole?), I stare in amazement that he is using the same model digital recorder that I use with no concern for hand noise on the body of the machine or wind noise. Just look at how he follows the kid on the skateboard. And the train that passes?! More wind than a Republican soccer mom after 2 bowls of refried beans! And close recording in spaces full of ambient noise? I dunno folks...something seems strange for a professional sound content provider.

But hey, he makes more dough than I do doing this stuff.

So, for that reason, worth a viewing. Oh, and more vids here.

        

If this ain't sound in the machine, I wouldn't know what is. Check it out first. My comments are below. 




Amazing as the performance is, I'm thinking of the role the video plays in suggesting the experience. Several things at work here.

The rapid hand movements heighten the affective momentum, not at all unlike watching the exaggerated movements of a conductor (who doesn't 'touch' the music, mind you). All this movement says, this thing is going somewhere and fast!

Unless you know what you're watching (Exile built a few of the controllers making that even more difficult), there is a tenuous relationship between the hardware and the resulting sound. We expect something a bit different. Faders don't increase or decrease the volume, but pull down the pitch and tempo; the keyboard makes bizarre intrusions, responsible for the least traditionally musical aspects of the performance. You're not in Kansas anymore.

The variations almost can't change fast enough- Exile's inspiration spilleth over, from mic to keyboard to drum pad. But if you only listen to the track, the variations seem more like transitions that never really get anywhere. At least that's my sense of it (and a commonplace complaint of dance music, "intelligent" or not).

Again, I think this is great stuff. Granted he's demoing a product and going for the WOW factor, even doing so somewhat outside of the context of many Reaktor users. Just the same, from a marketing point of view, the video tells us that we can do this too: just look at this guy! One guy and all this sound! That's pretty convincing, I'd say. From a production point of view, however, the video noticeably conceals the work Exile did in creating settings, mapping controls, assigning instruments, making ensembles, etc. It's almost like magic on the video. Too obvious to anyone looking to drop a few hundred $$ on a soft synth. To me, without it the video, the audience would have a greater appreciation for the production that went into the track. Unless you add in the rough edges.

And so on. This is all to say, there's more than sound going on here. As always, of course.

        

        

If there are any buyers-of-my-Christmas-gifts reading this, don't over look this!

        

        

        

        

        

If there’s any line in Clive Thompson’s article in last month’s Wired that jumps out at me, it’s “online media are pushing literacy into cool directions.”  I like it for its reservation.  Timid optimism. Thompson seems to really want to shout it on the mountain: New Literacy is Born! But he settles for a cool “cool” instead. Bugger. 

The skinny:

Pitting Andrea Lunsford against the Johnny-Can’t-Reads of the world, the selling point, based on Lunsford ‘s research, is that online contexts of communication are making students more sensitive to audience and timeliness, i.e. students report that good prose “has an effect on the world.”

OK, that’s a starting point, a “cool direction,” if you will, but can we scale texts, tweets, and social media comments up, as Thompson and so many academics are wont to do, to game-changer status?

Hmmm…

Public message boards (any YouTube video comment section will do) almost instantly become cesspools of vitriol and ire, with flamers feeding trolls and trolls keeping the torches lit. The intellectually engaged (and grammatically aware) folks in these open-ended communities tend to be drowned out. And I have grave doubts that anyone is ever persuaded about anything in these spaces, unless persuasion now means writing a comment about a comment that was a comment to a video that was commentary to being with. Cicero would've been so proud. In private spheres such as Facebook, most people communicate with fewer than 10 other people, even if they have hundreds of friends. And these are folks with whom they more than likely have a real friendship. Spurring to action? Effect on the world? Sounds like a stacked deck to me.

There is one point Thompson makes that I’m all for: “thebrevity of texting and status updating” teaches kids to be poetically terser. If they do it all the time, yeah, it probably does. The only thing they need to be un-taught is that they can’t always use this approach. Not when they want to get through school or write a Victorian novel. After that, when they return to the real world, no one has time for the ink-fishing and bloating that we force upon them every chance we get. “500 grammatically correct words and appropriately punctuated sentences on the approved paper format, Johnny, or you get a lower grade.” What does Johnny do? Of course! He knows how to write for his audience!

We just won’t tell him that because we know it’ll jeopardize our authority.