1. Imagination
2. Practicality
3. Creation
Imagination
In the imagination stage, I learned about other experiences with accented English and how various artists chose to represent it. More broadly, I explored different ways speech has been and can be represented in music.
Leos Janaček, Speech Melody Janaček was a Czech composer who catalogued extensive field recordings of everyday voices form all over his home country. He then notated those everyday voices into melodies, and used them as themes for his compositions, terming this process "speech melody."
Amy Tan, Mother Tongue Chinese-American author Amy Tan describes one variety of English: her Chinese mother’s unique expressions that don’t fit into typical grammar structures. In "Mother Tongue," Tan reflects on unconsciously separating herself from that English in favor of a more academic variety. She observes how others dismissed her mother’s intelligence due to her language. “That is, because she expressed them imperfectly, her thoughts were imperfect.”
Patrick Cox, The Linguistic Atlas Project Patrick Cox learns about the The Linguistic Atlas Project in an episode of his podcast Subtitle. The project aims to capture English folk dialects from around the United States, focusing on how small linguistic differences distinguish between areas. Allison Burkette, director of the Atlas Project, asks “how are people expressing their identities in being from a particular place? How is the idea of place or home created during these interviews?”
Brendan Kennelly, The Man Made of Rain Irish poet Brendan Kennelly starts the introduction to his book The Man Made of Rain with the phrase “There are many Englishes within English.” He offers an almost fantastical explanation for this: There are constantly different worlds we experience while living and there’s a separate set of language for each one. He asks, “Is there a different language for every different emotional planet?” In The Man Made of Rain he attempts to describe an experience he had in Nightenglish (a mystical, interior world) in Dayenglish (what we normally communicate with) through poetry.
Practicality
In the practicality phase, I layed out all these ideas and, with the help of valuable advisors from the School of Music, narrowed them down to what was possible for this project.
John Adams, Christian Zeal and Activity I've long admired this piece from American composer John Adams, and returned to it as I pushed my project toward practicality. Adams asks the conductor to include "sonic found objects" in the final performance. In conductor Edo de Waart's recording with the San Francisco Symphony, he uses excerpts from a Christian sermon as his found object. The resulting atmosphere of distant, godly speaking placed over a slow-moving string accompaniment greatly inspired my piece.
Paul Lanskey, Idle Chatter Lanskey's work served a different purpose: a vital counterexample. The piece takes small recordings of a voice speaking, and runs them through linear predictive coding and granular synthesis to create a warped yet musical picture of those original voices. I was originally interested in Lanskey's techniques, and potentially using the recordings of my family as small samples with which to create more music; however, listening more to his music made me realize that I wanted to have my recordings be as unedited as possible. This itself helped eliminate lots of creative possibilities.
Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon I don't think I've listened to any album of music more than this one. It's been a creative inspiration since I was young, and now holds a special place of comfort in my heart. After exploring all sorts of new ideas in the imagination phase, returning to the music I hold deeply in my body was vital. Snippets of conversations are placed all over the album, providing a similar feeling to that I hoped to create with mine.
Steve Roud, Folk Song Index Roud is a folksong collector who created an extensive catalogue of folksongs in the English language. Poking through his archives provides an invaluable look into folk culture. While my recordings are not song, I was inspired by Roud to make them more plain and accessible, without too many musical frills around them. This helped translate my imagination into practicality.
Creation
In the creation phase, I recorded conversations with Aine, Izzy, Adam, and Barbara, chose excerpts that were most meaningful, and put them into music. I spent most of my time at the computer, including recording and editing, but also indulged in some late-night piano playing too.