Deaf voices / Deaf art: Vocality through and beyond sound and sign1

Do we have a voice if we don’t speak a language? How does the voice of a sign language look like? What do we learn about vocality when we turn our ears and eyes towards deaf voices and the sign languages of the deaf? How can you make others hear the voice of a ‘silent’ minority? And what about ventriloquism, vocal interiority and acousmatic voice in the case of the deaf? By focusing mainly on the ways of the deaf with voice, especially as they materialize in the work of deaf artists using sound as the main material of their art-making, in this article I approach the significance of deaf vocalities for a wider understanding and experience of sound and voice for both the deaf and the hearing. The work of deaf artists working with sound and voice is an acoustic, vibratory, interpretive and activist lens through which we can get parallax views of our common assumptions about the vocal and listen to modulated renderings of our common conceptions of vocality. Through their investigations of the vocal and the sonic, deaf artists explore the deep roots of the metaphorical and symbolic valence of the vocal trope, while they steadily argue for alternative voices, non-acoustic, vibrational sonorities, through sign, motion, space, contact. Their experimental works unravel the experiential, metaphorical and theoretical facets of voice and sound, while they also project vocality onto other modes of communication and sociality, mainly sign and embodied ways of physical movement, thus extending the notion of voice to include sign languages and non-vocal communication. Deaf voices reveal a whole new field of questions on voice and agency, through and beyond sound and sign.

Animal listening

The ‘Elegy on the Nightingale’ is a curious Latin poem of uncertain (but probably post-classical) date and authorship that is transmitted by several medieval manuscripts. It offers a catalogue of animal sounds rich in what linguists call iconicity, and literary scholars, onomatopoeia: to read these verses aloud is to imitate the sounds being described. The poem begins in address to the nightingale of its title, praised for her ability to make music by mimicking all she hears. By the end has the poem itself done the same? For all their playfulness, the verses strike at the heart of our own theoretical commonplaces, starting with the supposed arbitrariness of the sign, always unsettled by such examples, exceptional though they may be. So too did the writing down of non-human sounds preoccupy ancient linguists, who sought to segregate them from language proper. Nevertheless, it is difficult to deny that these sound-words conjure what they name, especially since, in many cases, it is only our ability to match their sounds to animals we can still hear that enables us to know what the poem is saying. What happens to our understanding of the poetic text as a transcription of human speech or song when we take it seriously as a recording of non-human sound? And even more dramatically, what happens to our understanding of human language when we strive (as this poem strives, albeit surreptitiously) to listen with non-human ears? With some help from the animal imaginings of Jakob von Uexküll, this article attempts some preliminary answers.

Ventriloquism and translation: The translator’s voice in Caribbean literature

This article explores the concepts of voice and ventriloquism in translation through examining Finnish translations of Anglophone Caribbean novels. Four novels and their Finnish translations are discussed with focus on the translation of proverbs and references to Caribbean oral tradition. The translator’s own voice and the voices of other agents participating in the translation process become manifest both in the translation itself and in contextual materials related to the translation. The literary translator can be seen to act as the mouthpiece for a multitude of agents in addition to the author of the original work. The concept of ventriloquism can help shed light on the complex ways in which different voices can interact within the translation process and the ways in which translators must make choices on which voices to give precedence in the translated text.

Therapists’ response strategies in a group session involving French-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder

The focus in this article is on how two therapists orient a group of four French-speaking boys with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) towards achieving meaningful learning outcomes with regard to the topic of conversation. The analysis concentrates on the therapists’ output or response strategies when they orient the group discussion and assess speech produced by the children, either validating it or parts of it, or inviting them to provide more valid input. The material to be analysed comprises salient linguistic and interactional features in five examples representing the most frequent response categories. In terms of methodology, the study falls within the framework of conversation analysis, although insights from discourse analysis are also used to enhance the data interpretation. The results show that although a specific response category may have many functions, the aim in all of them is to maintain intersubjectivity among the participants. This is visible in the absence of overtly negative feedback, for example. The prosody gives strong clues concerning the additional meanings in the therapists’ response particles. Whereas the children maintain eye contact and show nuanced expressions such as smiling, the therapists’ attention is often directed towards notetaking and writing artefacts, behaviour that contradicts the ideal of ‘typical’ communication.

Reading aloud: The role of the reader and the conception of ‘self’

In this article I examine the prosody associated with different ways of reading aloud, in particular the speaker’s exploitation of pitch range, and I consider the way in which different styles project different speaking roles and with them different conceptions of self. I have chosen four different speaking styles: storytelling, newsreading, prayer and poetry-reading. They represent different degrees of markedness and are the styles that are referenced most frequently in a wide range of sources, allowing a comparison and synthesis of the different characterizations they contain. The sources from which I draw my evidence include impressionistic descriptions of ‘delivery’ in classical writings on rhetoric, and instructions in nineteenth- and twentieth-century manuals for recitation, public speaking and elocution training. All these accounts are aimed at improving the performance of individual speakers, but I also draw on more recent studies of intonation, which are motivated largely by potential applications in speech technology – speech recognition and speech synthesis. They combine qualitative and quantitative accounts based on acoustic analysis and include, for example, research on intonation and emotion and on the prosodic parameters of charismatic speech. Stylistic variation has traditionally been understood as variation according to situational context or setting, as is evident in the choice of styles for this article. An alternative view discussed here is Goffman’s notion of ‘participant roles’, important in socio-pragmatics, which relates ways of speaking to whether the speaker is acting for themselves or, for example, as a spokesperson, as in reading the news. Finally, in order to account for the overlap of prosodic features in ostensibly very different settings, such as poetry-reading and liturgy, I propose a unifying factor underlying the different styles, based on degrees of subjectivity and objectivity in the voice. I conclude that speakers respond not to a physical setting but to the kind of ‘self’ they wish to project.

Aspects of voice in the use of positioning in polyphonic storytelling: Ventriloquial moves within a biographical interview

This article investigates the rhetorical use of voices and ventrilocution in occasioned storytelling. We explore the use of external voicing in the narration, arguing that to understand voice as an argumentative resource, it is important to include both material and metaphoric aspects of voice. Our article explicates the differences and relations between these two aspects in a polyphonic life story interview. The material voice involves the acoustic sphere of communication: prosody, intonation and tone, whereas the metaphoric voice is commonly understood as a marker of subjectivity or group interests. We juxtapose the latter ‘representative’ interpretation of voice by applying Richard Walsh’s recent theory of metaphorical levels of the voice. Our material consists of a biographical interview with a 92-year-old woman accompanied in the situation by her daughter. The daughter interferes in the interview by telling competing stories about the family past. To unravel the rhetorical moves in the interview, we apply the concept of ventriloquism and the theory of narrative positioning. Our analysis demonstrates how the purposeful use of the material voice transports and signifies metaphoric voices as characters, actors and identities are negotiated in turn-by-turn unfolding narration.

Throwing one’s voice and speaking for others: Performative vocality and transcription in the Assemblées of the long nineteenth century

This article examines the role of the voice in practices of representation in nineteenth-century parliament. It asks how textual representations of vocal practices of political representation can be mobilized for the histories of politics and representation, and how such an enquiry can complicate our understanding of representation as a multifarious practice organized around speech. The article takes a particular case as its point of departure: that of the different Assemblées of nineteenth-century France, its vocal performances and the many practices of transcription, reporting and comment, such as those produced by an increasingly professional class of stenographers, journalists and satirists. Tracing the various ways in which representatives ventriloquized others, and were ventriloquized by different audiences and commentators, it draws attention to the acoustic aspects of parliamentary speech, and of the concept of representation itself. We focus on the representative quality of political vocality itself and also consider the practice of representing political speeches on paper (e.g. as transcripts or by journalists). Finally, and most importantly, we reflect on how the use of such representations could make the MP’s voice present even where his body was not. Thinking about the French case in a wide transnational context, we argue that including extra-linguistic aspects of speech in our analyses of oratory might draw attention to the embodied practices that served to make, imagine or sometimes disrupt beliefs about national belonging – thus delving into understandings of trustworthiness and political effectiveness beyond the particular national framework. Consequently, thinking about speech with and as sound allows us to think beyond the nation or national institutions when examining the practice of modern politics, its development and the continued importance of ventriloquial imaginations and materialities in political speech.