Jonathan Zorn: Language as Dust

Tuesday, April 21, 2015 at 8:00pm
World Music Hall

FREE!

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Jonathan Zorn presents two composition for speech and electronics, Language as Dust and Perforation. Language as Dust is an essayistic sound poem exploring the consequences of electronic mediation within spoken and written language. The text of the piece freely repurposes sources relating to the history of vocal technologies as well as psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of the voice, including Aristotle's De Anima, Thomas Edison's anticipated use of audio recording, abstracted lyrics of How High the Moon, misheard vocoder communications, and transcriptions of Electronic Voice Phenomena. Perforation features Sigmund Freud’s essay The Uncanny rewritten using Google Translate and Word‘s Auto Summarize function. Logically, the resulting texts are spoken through a vocoder.