Vocal Recall: Reading for a Friend’s Voice

It is not possible to hear the voice of the friend speaking actual words. No known recording of this friend’s voice exists. But in this case it is possible to hear a short characteristic sound.

It is not possible to hear the voice of the friend speaking actual words. No known recording of this friend’s voice exists. But in this case it is possible to hear short characteristic sounds.


Working on your own, silently recall the voice of a friend.


It is not possible to ask the friend to pronounce words. No words only vowels are heard at the beginning or end of phrases. The shapes of a vowel are a friend’s words.


Alternate

Recall the voice of a friend. Listening for sounds, practise silently repeating them.


It is not possible to ask the friend to pronounce words. No words only vowels are heard at the beginning or end of phrases. The shapes of vowels are friends’ words.


Alternate

Assume you are receiving segments of this text, transmitted by a friend.


I’m him, reading a book in the sun and shielding his eyes from my glance. It is not possible to hear the voice is of the friends speaking actual words. But in this case it is possible to hear short characteristic sounds.

Friends’ voice is hidden in attachment of letter s.

I answer the telephone as my mum sits at the table watching the conversation. Letter s is have a retrospective character. But when I call up the conversation’s phrase is and the concurrent visuals I don’t have the responders’ faces.


Alternate

The friend reading the text shifts the placement of their voice from consonants to vowels.


Voice is are what phone’s reception is. Redialling friends inside the home: these young men are retrospectively denuded by the telephone. Those who answer quickest have warmer pitch is but it is, with a corded telephone, harder to reach them.

I walk around my house in the dark. On the sofa’s cushions chucked from the sofa onto the floor. Less visited sentence is are plain with sibilance is. Entry is through these.


Notes
This text is adapted (as a form of expanded documentation) from the activities of an afternoon workshop Vocal Recall, 13 July 2022, Sheffield Hallam Fine Art Project Space, S1 Artspace, that I ran as part of Whispering Shouting Touching Passing, a project by the art, design, and media arts PhD community at SHU. My thanks to the reader-listeners, Emma Bolland, Susannah Gent, Debbie Michaels and Hester Reeve. The experience of listening for voices of friends was initially developed during 2021-22 with Deirdre Humphrys and is ongoing.

It is difficult to recall a friend’s voice. At first, there is an assumed analogue for the remembered voice of a friend in the intangibility of an internal reading voice. The analogue is imperfect. But the assumption is interesting.

The assumption of internally hearing a friend’s voice seems to block other experiences. In this way it describes what can barely be held as replicable sonic experiences. Continually, certain ways of listening for a friend’s voice make attempts to shift it away from an identity that is partial and dispersed.

Gradually, it seems possible to describe the voice of a friend as fragilely invested in the synching of sound and words. When I try to hear a friend, my memory doesn’t return a voice but small sounds that come with recollections of speech I can’t internally vocalise as them. We share this.

A friend’s characteristic expressions of sound are heard, but not their words. Teasing the position of letter s from its surroundings is an indirect attempt at desynching vowel sounds from their lexical positions. The vowels stretch into the detached places left by s is. For there to be someone else here, I chafe orthography to get little bits of sound off: small phonemic bits. Really, this is where the friend lives.

*

Julia Calver is an artist and writer working with experimental linguistic morphologies. Recent work has been published in The Proceedings of CARPA 7: Elastic Writing in Artistic Research, UniArts, Helsinki (2022); The Happy Hypocrite, issue 12 (2021); Setting a Bell Ringing (2021) and ON CARE (2020) published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE. Recent audio work has been broadcast by Radiophrenia (2022); Resonance Extra (2021) and oHPo radio, SHU (2021). Julia is currently completing a PhD at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU).
www.juliacalver.co.uk

*

Reading List
Alice Notley, ‘Voice’, in Coming After: Essays on Poetry, University of Michigan Press, 2005, pp. 147–57.
Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Meditations, [n.p.]: Smith Publications, 1971.
Selah Saterstrom, Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics, Berkeley, CA: Essay Press, 2017.
Sarah Wood, Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces, Edinburgh University Press, 2013.