schizophonia

Distanced and distorted – how shizophonia makes me feel

My first experience with this idea/concept was around ten years ago. I was still a child. This is a very vivid memory and for some reason the first thing that came to mind when confronted with the term shizophonia.
My father was out of the country for a long time, he was in Vienna completing a master’s degree. He would leave for months at time. We lived in Nairobi at the time. Back then, long distance phone calls were expensive, so we had a designated phone call once a week. I remember walking outside in the warm evening, having to walk up a hill to make sure we were in range of the network. In my hand I held my mother’s blackberry, which was ultra-modern at the time, with the keypad for writing your emails. It would look like a brick compared to our iPhones today.
I stood there for a while waiting for his call. And when the phone rang and I answered, I heard my voice resonate back to me a distorted ‘Hi, Dad’. Layered on top of his voice and what he was responding to me, I kept on hearing the echoes of what I was saying. It felt so weird. The voice sounded like mine, but it wasn’t coming from me. It was being repeated back to me while I was trying to use my voice to say something else. For some reason, I’ve never forgotten this memory, because even as an 11 year old, I found it so strange and awkward to hear 'myself' like that. And today, when told to reflect about shizophonia, I went right back to that memory, my experience with it.
How distanced it made me feel from my own voice, something that belongs to me. And yet it was being taken from me, and repeated back to me, without my consent. And what a strange experience to hear my own voice when I'm not actually saying anything.
Today, I think I'm more used to it. Though it will always be strange to hear my voice being played back at me from another source, I expect it more now. I take videos of my singing and have to listen to them, sometimes videos are taken in social situations with friends. I am constantly recording and being recorded and have somewhat gotten used to hearing my own voice, maybe in the background of some random video, being played back to me, not coming from me. But this first experience and the strange feeling I felt remains intact in the depth of my memory. The voice being echoed wasn’t my voice. In fact it was very separate from me. I was shocked at it, hearing intonations in it that I didn’t know were there when I was saying them. Our voice/speech is not only the words we choose, but it carries an essence of us, it speaks and shows people how we are feeling at the moment, it reveals what is inside of us. In a somewhat exposing way. So when we hear it being played back to us we can listen to it in a different way, maybe hear the things we are revealing about ourselves. And it’s not a comfortable sensation, because most of the time we are revealing signs sub-consciously. And when we are confronted with this information, we start thinking about what we are revealing consciously. I think that is what makes it uncomfortable.

ihram

Amrita

Title: Yes Hello, Can You Hear Me?

In this piece, I wanted to explore the idea of the disembodied voice as it relates to technology. I recorded a voice asking 'Yes hello, can you hear me?' on a smart phone, and then placed this phone in a variety of objects and spaces, as the recording played, in order to see how the sound would be altered. With another phone, I recorded the sound projected from the first smart phone. I put the first phone in cooking pots, shoes, under the bed, in the mattress, in my cupboard, I sat on it, put it in my pillow, on a high shelf, in the fridge, in the mailbox, the bathroom, under the couch, and on the balcony. Through this experimentation, the recorded voice changed its quality based upon the location the phone projected the sound from. After playing the various sound samples back, I would argue that the recorded voice sample was not really fundamentally altered by these experiments, and no matter where the sound was projected from, it generally only changed quality in terms of loudness, or seeming clearer or more muffled. On the other hand, the human voice that emerges from a person is fundamentally altered when it is recorded on a smart phone, and goes through a much more profound transformation than any of changes I attempted to put my recorded voice sample through.

Nelson:

nationmaking

play the hymn
give sound to the images
create nations

create your own nation

Photography is often understood as a document or a proof for something. The photographic image is referred to as a reflection of reality which is able to serve as a proof for how something looked or even how something looks. To me there seems to be a split between what an image is mimicing and the image itself. This goes for every image. Every sign has three functions: It serves as an Icon, something that signifies something purely through mimicing it; as an Index, something that refers to something through its physical connection; and as a Symbol -- something that is commonly understood to refer to something else. Every sign always implies all of these three functions but one of them will be understood as the major one (Charles Sanders Peirce, Semiotic).
In the field of photo theory it is believed that a photo serves as an Icon because of its function as an Index. I believe that these two functions need to be divided. The physical connection of a photo to the light that struck the photosensitive surface does not automatically make it a proof for something or for how something looked. There's no stronger connection to what the photo is mimicing than there would be e.g. in a painting. I could go on for quite a while but it might get boring then. The point for this photographic image is though that it tries to underline a split between reality and its mimesis.

I wanted to make an image which refers to sound or at least can be interpreted that way. To flash at snow flakes right in front of the lens, even focussing the lens on them without seeing them, seemed to make sense as means to making something visible which I can normally not see but also as a reference to sounds which give me the impression of a room. I then took this picture to the darkroom and used a print technique to always just expose these little stripes on to the paper. I would then move the paper to position the stripes in a pattern that I wanted to look like the key pattern of a piano to further emphasize the reference to music.