In the Absence of
2023

This performance is an attempt to bridge the discussions of voice and silence in two different fields, sound (art) and oral history, which is carried out as follows:

Choose a body the musical qualities of which you would like to evoke.
Put a driver-implemented mask on the body and connect it to an amplifier.
Insert in-ear microphones and cover them with earmuff.
Plug the in-ear microphones into Input 1 and 2 or a stereo input of the sound board.
Connect Sub Output to the amplifier for the driver-implemented mask.
Click “start recording” button of the patch.
The following excerpt will play for twenty-five times:

There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death.

Have the mask-wearer mouth the following passage in silence when the last loop plays back:

In the absence of official records or historical documents, we turn to bodies that bear witness. The bodies and their voices are the “living proof” of what has not been written down. Those who claim their voices as living proof must reconcile with the fact that all bodies that make sounds die. Bodies decay, just as sound does. What happens to the voice, then? What happens to the truth entailed thereby?

The driver built into the mask emits sound into the mouth of the wearer, which can be modulated by articulatory organs (lips, tongue, glottis, etc.), is captured by in-ear microphones. The sound modulated thus—which differs from the sound that comes straight out of the driver—is most of the time only audible to the wearer. This effect of "private voice" is somewhat like a reverse mechanism of voice production. Consider: When a person produces a voice, her speech is "voiced" in the vocal tract and articulated in the oral cavity, the final outcome of which exits the mouth and is heard via air conduction. In the particular situation of this performance, the sound from the mask is modulated in the oral cavity of the wearer, but that modulated sound only goes inside the throat of the receiver, audible mostly via bone conduction and therefore private to the wearer only. The mechanism of this setup has been mainly inspired by a Sakhalin Ainu “throating” game known as rekuxkara.

Yes, the body acts as a filter; it filters out all of the frequencies except the resonant ones. It has to do with the architecture, the physical dimensions and acoustic characteristics of the body…If the dimensions of a body are in a simple relationship to a sound that is played in it, that sound will be reinforced, that is, it will be amplified by the reflections from the inner surface.

Audio-visual performance
Duration: Approx. 30 min.
Premiered at SOMA Art Space Berlin

Date: August 12, 2023
Part of listen listening, an experimental broadcast platform and exhibition organized and produced by oolongradio

Huge thanks to Jiyoung Yoon

HAN GIL JANG