Magnifying lenses: How the spectral analysis of the voice – human and animal – can be used to strengthen the connection between text and music

This commentary describes how my compositions in the last four years have been based upon models of human and animal vocal utterances, including both textual and paralinguistic elements, and how they strengthen the connection between text and music especially via synthetic relationships, based on the reproduction of the microscopic sound features of the voices which utter text. The textual elements are projected into the speech domain, thus acquiring uniqueness and including in the composition the aura of the being whose voice is analysed and later re-synthesised by the instruments involved. Varied repetition is used to feature text at multiple levels of enlargement, or filtering stages. All these occurrences of the same textual material have been regarded as nodes of a rhizome, since I conceived them as windows on to plateaux with different temporal scales or filtering processes, all intersecting a clearly defined socio-political plateau. The window form proved very useful for the inclusion of improvisation-based blocks and for the incorporation of elements from previously existing compositions into new ones. The Deleuzian concept of the rhizome created a suitable frame for the main aspects of my research and, since the change of analytical methodology in the course of the portfolio reflects my growing interest in perception, it is my intention to proceed along the path shown by Deleuze and Bergson to investigate the concepts of repetition and memory. Within the portfolio, the socio-political layer is at first determined by the content of the text, but later also by the identity of the person uttering the text and the techniques (s)he uses, so that in one of my compositions I successfully embedded music belonging to a non-Western culture. These trends show a future path for my research – namely, the identification of social differences among individuals and the detection of the traces of trauma through the analysis of their voices.