(Mayakovsky) Study for Instrumental Trans Communication, Voice, and Autotune at Rainbow in Spanish

musicnight_ris(Mayakovsky) Study for Instrumental Trans Communication, Voice, and Autotune at Rainbow in Spanish with Katya Chepka

Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC) is a rebranding of the earlier parascientific/paranormal research methodology EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomenon, which searched radio airwaves for communications from the dead.  Popularized by Constantin Raudive’s book Breakthrough, the idea of electronic communication with the dead surged toward the end of the 20th Century and has recently had a minor resurgence due to television shows featuring the technological investigation of the paranormal.  ITC devices are essentially radio scanners that skip through radio bands at a user selectable speed, focusing primarily on the ranges between the strong signals dominated by noise. The theory is that the radio spectrum is employed by the dead to communicate with the living through the rapidfire skipping over of different radio frequencies. The degraded quality of many of the communications and ‘voices’ is believed by Raudive to be the result not just of the difficulty of communicating from beyond the veil, but also of the degraded, dehumanized quality of the dead.

The intentionally exaggerated use of Autotune in popular music renders the singers’ voice somewhere between dehumanized and superhuman, altering the human voice, the earliest, most basic, and universal musical instrument, into something literally less or more than human. This technological ‘dehumanization’ or ‘superhumanization’, triggers a sort of technojouissance in the listener, judging by the popularity of Autotune in popular and dance music, whereas its often more jarring uses contain a frisson of alienation and mirrors the claims of ITC and Raudive’s contention that the dead are literally dehumanized.

The name and supposed voice of Mayakovsky, the Russian Futurist poet likely ‘suicided’ by Stalin, appears starkly in one of Raudive’s recordings. Mayakovsky’s poetry, alternating between revolutionary exultation and alienation, forms the vocal basis of the piece, read by Katya Chepka and manipulated by Autotune, at times ‘singing’, at others, ‘dehumanized’.

Kodwo Eshun, from More Brilliant than the Sun:

“The vocoder turns the voice into a synthesizer…Turning the voice into a synthetic spectrum of perverse voco-imps lets you talk with cartoons, become cartoon, become animal, become supercomputer. Just as machine vision runs from infrared to ultraviolet, so the vocoder spectrum runs from hyperbabble to ultraslow. Initially developed as German military technology for camouflaging transmissions, the vocoder cuts out vocal frequencies, petrifying the voice into a robotik current, an antagonistically nonhuman Voice of Doom.

[…]

With Zapp, Roger Troutman’s voice is all vowel, an eesysquezy squidge of phonoglutamate, voco-concentrate. The synthesizer passes through his vocal tract.

The vocoder generates a menagerie of machine voices, nonhuman subjects. These voices aren’t anempathetic or robotic. Rather they are disconcertingly oral, larynx machines, synthetic pharynxes that stretch the vowels into plastic.

[…]

Traditionally, 20th C science sterilizes all myth: myth starts where science stops. But the recording medium acts as an interface between science and myth. Every medium opens up a continuum from technology to magic and back again. Magic is just another name for a future, an as- yet unknown medium, a logic identified by both Arthur C. Clarke – ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology becomes indistinguishable from magic’ – and Samuel R. Delany: ‘At the material level, our technology is becoming more and more like magic.’

…flagrantly confusing machines with mysticism, systematizing this critical delirium into information mysteries.

[…]

Marshall McLuhan: ‘Electric channels of information have the effect of reducing [or elevating) people to the disincarnate status of instant information. We are transported electronically and bodily.’