#this was also very experimental i dont usually paint digitally but i felt like doing it for this one

[jaybirdsandbabybats]

// cw eyestrain //

been getting back into jojo lately, here's a diego

[foreignquarry]

VOICE OVERS

DISCLAIMER:

unfortunately, due to storage limitations and glitches with my computer during the editing process, I lost a lot of the drafts and practice cuts that featured some experimentation. I’ll try to instead describe the different things I tried.

-- voice over --

third person narration -----

the sections of the film that involve third person narrative prose describing scenes at odds with what the viewer sees. initially, i used my own voice for this, in a sort of rough cut just to help with pacing. using this rough cut made me think that using my voice was not the right way forward, just because i wasnt personally happy with the performance i managed.

last year, i did a lot of experimentation with my voice and vocal performance. i developed different techniques to explore the unhuman aspects of communication, especially through a lens of technology. i used a piece of software called Lyrebird to generate a synthetic vocal avatar - an artificial intelligence trained to mimic my own voice. at the time, i used this to distance my physical self and parody my inability to express myself.

SADLY, this software was bought out by some company and is no longer accessible as it was, and no longer for free. it’s hidden behind the facade of this other, new software that im not familiar with and dont care to learn. there are other methods of vocal avatar generation that i may investigate, but this ruled out this option at this stage.

instead, i tried to use some generic text-to-speech programs to generate synthetic voices. i hoped that this would help add to the eeriness of the film, and the feeling of it being abandoned and devoid of humanity. i used a white-sounding male-sounding British-accented posh-sounding voice, to parody this sort of David Attenborough nature/museum documentary. of course, this sort of voice being a voice of God in film, through tradition, speaks to bigotries and patriarchal authoritarianism. like, we need white men to tell us what the things we are seeing are. this was something i was back-of-the-mind-conscious of at the time, but hadn’t fully questioned it. although it’s maybe a conceptually sound idea, it didn’t at all sound good, or right. with this automated voice in particular, the film was lacking a human quality, i felt. there are no humans visually present in the film, and there is a stark absence of humanity in the way the stories are reanimated from the stone. my human arm has been digitally removed, and the traces are all that remain.

--

the next thing i tried was a more intentional and intimate style of performance, modelled after the recent trend of ASMR videos.

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), sometimes auto sensory meridian response,[2][3][4] is a tingling sensation that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. A pleasant form of paresthesia,[5] it has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia[6][7] and may overlap with frisson.

ASMR signifies the subjective experience of "low-grade euphoria" characterized by "a combination of positive feelings and a distinct static-like tingling sensation on the skin". It is most commonly triggered by specific auditory or visual stimuli, and less commonly by intentional attention control.[1][8] A genre of videos which intend to stimulate ASMR has emerged, of which over 13 million are published on YouTube.[9]

I’m interested in this form of vocal performance in the way it attempts to target and illicit a specific physical reaction. Ed Atkins has spoken about the way technology develops, seeks to conquer various physical senses, ie, IMAX cameras making screens too large for one person’s eyesight, or sound systems rattling bones. ASMR attempts to create euphoric physical feelings, comparable to orgasm. as such, there is a sort of unspoken sexual quality to a lot of these videos and to a lot of these vocal stylings. often, and indeed usually, the speakers or performers in these videos are attractive women. 

in this episode of the podcast Reasonably Sound, Mike Rugnetta makes the comparison between this sort of work, and the sexist history of the female voice assistant, in early telecoms and switchboard operators, up to the present, female Siri or Google Home. there are, maybe unsuitable or offensive, connections to be made between this sort of outsourced female labour, the sexual qualities of ASMR, and sex work. but, i dont think it’s really my place to touch on it. there’s just some interesting dynamics around service and power in this form.

the episode can be found here: 

http://reasonablysound.com/2014/10/02/whisper-quiet/

anyway, technically, this phenomena doesn’t really exist, scientifically. it does exist in the minds of people who watch this stuff. so, there’s a fun pseudo-science sort of thing here, that compels me too. like a sort of witchcraft to do with audio frequencies.

in this vocal performance, then, i tried to allow my voice to take on these ASMR qualities. i whispered the words into my microphone from a very close distance, to encourage uncomfortable mouth sounds, saliva pops, and microphone peaks. these sounds are ASMR triggers, but also betray the audio recording in a few ways. it’s uncomfortable for the viewer to hear mouth and body sounds so loudly. it reveals the work as an unprofessional one, working with what would be considered to be bad recording practices. it also brings qualities of a human body, and particularly gross qualities at that, to the film, lending it a subjective human presence.

--

i feel mixed about how this has worked overall. i think it totally creates the correct responses in a viewer, but there’s no denying that in being the Voice of God for this film, i am painting myself to be the God of this world. my narration, although at odds with what the viewer sees, speaks to my authorial power, and im not sure this is a power i want to be spoken about!! as a middle class, white man, i think i need to question more thoroughly what it means for me to give myself authority in this context...

this was something Dave Beech mentioned in our crits with him, recently.

this is all in my head as i continue to experiment with the narration and voice over in this film. i dont anticipate i will have brought this any further by the end of the project, but that’s ok. here is a video showing the current way my voice is sounding in this passages:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzgbVBFhvRc

first person stories ---

now, this is also complicated.

at the beginning of the project it felt very important to me that the stories would only appear visually, as text, and not as audio. in the writing i have gone to lengths to recreate, phonetically and visually, regional accents and period grammar. understanding my limited ability as a voice performer, i felt it would be gross and inappropriate for me to perform these texts myself. that it would be sort of equivalent to cultural appropriation, especially as im not actually from the South West (unless u go some ways back down the tree).

however, this being said, i ended up opting for a sort of version of a performance. i experimented with different styles of delivery, attempting accents and different styles of voice. i also experimented with isolating select frequencies. the OM frequency of the tuning fork is the one i chose to isolate, producing a distant-sounding voice that is hard to identify as mine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hQDgEWFRIM&t=41s

for a necessarily female voice, however, this proved to be tricky. immediately in the crit, it seemed people could identify the recording as a poor attempt at an impression on my part, even though i thought i had done quite well with my shakespearean old woman impression. i ended up taking this audio and distorting it even further. the vocal inflections and sentence patterns are still identifiable, and when watching the text it is easy to follow along with the sound, but it is so distorted and modified i dont feel it can be traced back to me anymore. the femininity and the quality of the accent and the age of the caracter are all identifiable as well, i feel. over the course of this video the clip becomes more distorted, as if the stone tape is losing its fidelity on playback:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2A6jY-C1UA

i find this absolutely successful, especially on the speakers with which i listen to it. although as i continue working i might go back on this idea.