Harald Münz: "Fruitful misunderstandings - musical composition using phonetic elements"
To deal with speech as music may entail to transfer artistic methods onto phonetic materials considering analogies between musical parameters and those from speech production. This mapping process is often facilitated by similarities in terminology between language and music (e.g. speech 'melody' or speech 'rhythm'), although, on a phenomenological level, quite different things may be addressed. For the listener this often leads to a multifaceted perceptual situation oscillating between broken semantics and phonetics. My own musical imagination often applies phonetic thinking to instrumental music, even when no actual speech sounds are involved. In hindsight, part of this may be linked to my studies in Cologne under Clarence Barlow in 1989, as well as to my studies of 'Aesthetic Phonetics' in the Phonetics Department at the University of Cologne. With musical extracts at hand, the talk will illustrate some ways of treating phonetic material in a musical way comparing approaches from my own work to that by other composers.
see also:
https://soundcloud.com/harald-muenz
www.brunel.ac.uk/people/harald-muenz
Peter Ablinger: The gap between language and music
The alternative to language and music - in my own language - is called 'thinking and listening'. The difference is one of existence, indicating a different mode of being here. The way I understand the mode 'listening' is close to a HERE, while the mode 'thinking' is exactly being NOT here. That's why I am calling the difference existential.
James Kirby: "Singing in tone: An introduction to tonal text-setting"
Many of the languages of Asia and Africa are what linguists call tone languages, meaning that they make use of pitch to indicate differences in lexical or grammatical meaning. This leads naturally to the following question: if pitch is being used to distinguish meaning, how can speakers of tone languages understand lyrics when they are set to music? In other words, how is (linguistic) tone reconciled with (musical) melody? In this presentation, I will discuss the text-setting principles that underlie the traditional and modern musics of several East Asian tone languages, and point out some linguistic and musical differences that are reflected in tonal text-setting principles.
Bodo Winter: "Sound symbolism and the senses"
Some words sound like what they mean. For example, the words click and peep resemble the sounds they denote, a phenomenon that is variously called 'iconicity', 'sound symbolism' or 'onomatopoeia'. These contrasts with the arbitrariness of language, with many words not resembling their meanings, such as the word green, which does not sound 'green' at all. In my talk, I will explore the tug of war between iconicity and arbitrariness from the perspective of sensory perception, showing that some sensory phenomena are more likely to be expressed iconically than others. Overall, I will provide evidence for the idea that iconicity is an important design feature of language.
Clarence Barlow: "On Synthrumentation - the spectral analysis of speech for subsequent resynthesis by acoustic instruments"
‘Synthrumentation’ is a technique for the resynthesis of speech with acoustic instruments developed by the composer Clarence Barlow in the early 1980s. Over the past decade instrumental speech synthesis has also been thematised by a diverse range of composers (e.g. Peter Ablinger, Jonathan Harvey, Kenn McSperitt or Kiyomitsu Odai). This presentation seeks to explain the basic mechanics of the synthrumentation technique and also demonstrate its practical application through an analysis of Barlow’s ensemble piece Im Januar am Nil composed between 1981 and 1984, as well as a Macintosh computer program.
