Speech Patterns by NOAH WALL

Liner notes by Alan Licht:

There can be a thin line between spoken language and music; if “every room has its own melody hiding there until it’s made audible,” as Alvin Lucier once said, then maybe every sentence does too. Sure, there’s sprechstimme, and talkboxes, vocoders and other gadgets that exploit the tonal qualities of speech and split the difference between spoken and sung words; and many instances of free improvisation between two or more people can have a conversational quality. But with this collection Noah Wall charts a new course in composition via processing recordings of human speech from a unique hybrid of autotuning and musique concrete, a combination of sonic applications that seems so inevitable it’s remarkable that no one else has engineered it sooner.

Starting with a phone machine message left by the late Michael Evans, Noah took a bunch of YouTube videos of conversations and speeches, put the audio through Melodyne (an autotune app) and then saved the results as a MIDI document. From there he spread the data out to various MIDI instruments to play back the pitch conversions of the sourced talk. The material is stretched out, looped, and manipulated in various ways to achieve a true polyphony that belies its monophonic origins. Even more than musique concrete, the results seem utterly divorced from their original source, as here another layer of representation is eliminated by rubbing out the content of the speeches, as opposed to using a sound recognizable as a train, for instance, or anything whose sound only signifies the object itself rather than additionally conveying a linguistic meaning. Sometimes they’re purposely contrary to their source material, as in the ominous, bass-heavy ”ASMR,” a marked contrast to the intentionally soothing, semi-whispered female voice it’s taken from. The music is startlingly melodic, given its backstory, but Noah’s old one-man band Jukeboxer demonstrated his capabilities as a tunesmith; Speech Patterns is the logical product of the same mind behind the Jukeboxer songs as well as the subversive masterstroke of making anagrams of every Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt Oblique Strategy card (Grotesque Tables II). The music’s polyrhythms, derived from the cadences of the speakers’ phrasing, indicate a parallel between polyrhythm and dialogue, as well as recalling Conlon Nancarrow’s dizzying Studies for Player Piano and Frank Zappa’s “While You Were Art II” (a Synclavier playback of a transcription of one his guitar solos).

Not to mention that Speech Patterns sidesteps the typical funhouse-mirror goofiness of experimental music that leaves spoken word too recognizable as such after being subjected to various electronic modifications. By transmuting the human voice into pure pitch and rhythm rather than pulling a melody out of thin air or relying on tried-and-true chord progressions and time signatures, Noah also eliminates the gestural cliches so prevalent in composed music. (Hanne Darboven’s practice of conjuring strikingly tonal music solely from mathematical calculations comes to mind as another precursor.) Paradoxically, this is music that speaks to the nexus of sound and human identity that could only be achieved by machines, equally organic and synthetic.

Multidisciplinary artist and composer based in New York

noahwall.com
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