A Chorus of Geo-haptic Tones is a film created by Felicia Konrad and Julieanna Preston for the occasion of Voices in and out of Place: Misplaced, Displaced, Replaced and Interlaced Voices, the second biennial conference of the Vicarious Vocalities, Simulated Songs project hosted by Newcastle University, UK. This original work
It is common knowledge that sound waves travel through the environment and atmosphere as energy that vibrates the molecules of solid, liquid, or gaseous material. Their acoustic behaviour is a reflective, absorptive, or transmissive response to any surface with which they come in contact. Temperature, wind speed, humidity, topography, season, currents, tides, and solar and lunar cycles propagate sound waves in global and local landscapes.
A voice launched is a sound that touches the world. What happens when the world touches back?
This film is a vocal performance between two friends, two women, two lands, two continents on opposite sides of the earth. Two voices migrate back and forth in an improvisational, vibrating circuitry navigating through thick, loose, dense, light, smooth, turbid, calm, fierce and fickle geography, each refrain gaining and loosing bits of the landscape it has touched as it unfurls and unfolds. Adjustments and inflections retune the voice as it makes its way from here to there, now to then, her to her, again and again—a refrain of geo-haptic tones.
Not as simple as calling out to send a message, it is a volley, a round, a processual chorus transformed by a process of repeated exchanges keeping voice alive, fluid and connected to the body and world.
As an online event, this voice also travels a digital geography inclusive of its virtual and technical apparatus. How many bodies are listening? How many voices fill the physical and digital atmosphere?
A voice projected, unleashed, and roaming wild, sheds its habit to be proper song, harmonious and melodic sound, and voice disciplined as a mouthpiece of spoken language, text, words, and chatter. Travelling through a global geography, this voice regains its suppressed rawness, its relation to the gut and bodily orifices—a process of reclaiming voice as it might have been before its castration from sensations, emotions, and subjectivities, perhaps before the voice was colonised as a cognitive word-based communication instrument.
Click on the image below to watch/hear the film.
