Melissa Ragona

“The Grain of the Voice Remixed: Phase Experiments, Granular Syntheses, and MASH-UPS”
Wednesday, May 7th at 4 p.m.
Humanities 1006

“The Grain of the Voice Remixed” will consider two main theorists who have dominated the study of the voice in contemporary art: Roland Barthes and Michel Chion. Barthes points to an almost electronic quality that the voice possesses—something beyond timbre and tonality. For him, the body is the unexplainable quality that the voice suggests—"the body in the voice as it sings." The body does not "house" the voice, but is its very product, its material, and its language. In contrast, Chion argues that it is the disembodied voice of cinema, of electronic music that offers us a glimpse of its complexity—its ability to be neither entirely inside or nor clearly outside visibility. The acousmatic is a sound whose source we cannot see (dating back to Pythagoras's use of a curtain to conceal "the Master's Voice")— and has been a useful term in explaining the disjuncture that occurs in the space of cinema. Explained as a kind of ventriloquism, it has also helped to isolate the elusive materiality of the voice. It is precisely this shifting materiality of the voice—especially as it is transformed by technologies (both digital and analog)—that this talk will interrogate. Traversing the phase experiments of Steve Reich, the granular synthesis and spectral tracing of Trevor Wishart, and the Mashups of 2 Many DJs, and her own lo-fi experiments with Heidegger remixes, Melissa Ragona will question the body saturated theories of the voice, freeing it from corporeal essentialism, as an element that can be "read" as separable from the body.

BIO

A Center fellow in 2001-2002, Melissa Ragona was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of English during the 2002-2003 school year, where she coordinated the University Film Festival. Ragona's critical and creative work focuses on sound design, film theory and new media practice and reception. Her essay, "Hidden Noise: Strategies of Sound Montage in the Films of Hollis Frampton," appeared in the journal, October in 2004. She also participated in the Princeton conference: Gloria! The Legacy of Hollis Frampton (November 2005) in which she addressed the relationship between film and sculpture in the work of structuralist filmmaker Hollis Frampton and sculptor Carl Andre. Her essay, "From Abstract Expressionism to Popism: Marie Menken's Cinematic Study of an Aesthetics of Surface," is forthcoming in the Duke University Press book, Women Experimental Filmmakers this spring. Two other critical essays, one on the use of sound in the work of filmmaker Paul Sharits, the other on experimental film and sculpture will be appearing in books from University of Minnesota Press and Centre for British Film and Televisions Studies in London, respectively. She is currently working on a book manuscript: Readymade Sound: The Recording Aesthetics of Andy Warhol, which examines Warhol's tape recording projects from the mid-sixties until the late 70s in light of the rich history of audio experiments in modern art in which sound and listening became central objects of study. Ragona is currently Assistant Professor of Art in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.