Vocal Intensities

 Minimalist sculpture and music investigates the spaces between objects and their viewers and listeners. In underscoring the art object and the art viewer as interwoven into a conversation exchange in which the object produces the looking/listening, and the looking/listening produces the object, comes to suggest the field of attention as a performative arena. Thus, art objects do not so much contain or embody meaning but rather are given meaning through performative exchange. pg. 101

To Conflate the complexities of the voice with the aesthetic area of the arts is to pose a multilayered consideration, one that must leave the speaking subject behind to hear the sonicity of speech, while returning to the subject, as embodiment of an orality that is always already more than itself. The voice thus completes and complicates the signification of sound by adding and subtracting presence, by overriding the symbolic domain of language with too much signification, too much body, and too much voice, and by relying upon language, by keeping intact, as referent, the means of signification. Thus, to pursue the voice as heard in art is to approach a field of danger, for as sonic media the voice aims for language as its target.pg. 106

Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art by Brandon LaBelle

The first section is something I've often thought about but not been able to put into words. The idea that objects are performative in nature and the exchange between object and viewer as a conversation. Or even objects and other objects. 

The second section relates to the multiple elements happening when speech is used in art- it is the content of the language as well as the sonic quality of the sound, how voice suggests the body and presence yet also is without the body. The challenge when using voice is that the listener often rushes to understand the language and may miss the content in sonic qualities.