Phonodia

Abstract

This essay focuses on the ‘voice’ as it sounds in a specific type of recordings. This recordings always reproduce a poet performing a poem of his/her by reading it aloud. Nowadays this kind of recordings are quite common on Internet, while before the ’90 digital turn it was possible to find them only in specific collection of poetry books that came with a music cassette or a CD. These cultural objects, as other and more ancient analogic sources, were quite expensive to produce and acquire. However, all of them contain this same type of recoding which share the same characteristic: the author’s voice reading aloud a poem of his/her. By bearing in mind this specific cultural objet and its characteristics, this study aims to analyse the «intermedial relation» that occur between a poetic text and its recorded version with the author’s voice. This «intermedial relation» occurs especially when these two elements (text and voice) are juxtaposed and experienced simultaneously. In fact, some online archives dedicated to this type of recording present this configuration forcing the user to receive both text and voice in the same space and at the same time This specific configuration not just activates the intermedial relation, but also hybridises the status of both the reader, who become a «reader-listener», and the author, who become a «author-reader». By using an interdisciplinary approach that combines philosophy, psychology, anthropology, linguistics and cognitive sciences, the essay propose a method to «critically listening» some Spanish poets’ way of vocalising their poems. In addition, the book present Phonodia web archive built at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice as a paradigmatic answer to editorial problems related to online multimedia archives dedicated to these specific recordings. An extent part of the book is dedicated to the twenty-eight interviews made to the Spanish contemporary poets who became part of Phonodia and agreed in discussing about their personal relation to ‘voice’ and how this element works in their creative practice.