Distant Voice Research Articles

Creating Artistic Images on Chong Lim Ng’s A Distant Voice of the Rain Forest (Fragments from Rimba…) for piano solo (2008, revised in 2012)

Creating Artistic Images on Chong Lim Ng’s A Distant Voice of the Rain Forest (Fragments from Rimba…) for piano solo (2008, revised in 2012)

Bring us deliverance, spy! (прочтения Марша шпионов Киплинга в условиях информационной войны и пандемии)

The essay is concerned with decoding the subject (cognitive) content of R. Kipling's The Spies' March, notable mainly for its proud name. The problem is that the text is created using the double coding technique; it is fundamentally ambiguous and can be read in two ways, allowing in both cases various cognitive and semantic interpretations in the modern historical and cultural context. The spy attribution of the March is a clever deception, created first by the author in the hope that the readership will be able to uncover his language game following the old adage “a good [poetic] witch covers her tracks, but a better [semiotic] one can uncover them”. That’s what they call now research, investigation or enquiry, depending on purpose and circumstances. He refers to “spies” as epidemiologists who fought the outbreak of plague in Manchuria in 1911. For Kipling, it was a language game, the poetic purpose of which was to describe in purely military terms and partly in Bible language of the Apocalypse the fight against the epidemic, which, in its intrinsic “quest” for globalization, threatened to outgrow into a pandemic. Unfortunately, the readers proved to be too gullible, neglecting to analyze biblical references of The March and its dramatized composition in which two choruses are opposed to each other and which is preceded by a distant Voice; they often trusted the title’s literal meaning, and preferred to read The March as glorification of spies. To do this, it is just enough to “turn” the Yellow Flag of the original (a symbol of a pandemic disaster) into a proud one, a flag of dignity and fame. In Russia, translators have also joined this process. Details of such a false-negative decryption are presented in the section entitled “Lexical, symbolic and discursive keys for decoding The March”. The technique of creating and decoding an ambivalent text is, of course, the main object of theoretical analysis. Nevertheless, in terms of application, the potential use of the key ideological “messages” of The March in the global information and political environment, giving now a lot of place to politainment as well as infotainment, is even more important to explore. We consider two major “messages”: «There are not leaders to lead us to honour» и «Bring us deliverance, spy!». The tasks of such a politainment entreprise might be to form a causal relationship between these two Kipling’s brainchilds, namely, to personalize the "spy" in the international media discourse and entrust him with the implementation of Kipling's order regarding deliverance from current “calamities”. The mainstream media trend shows that the greatest chances to become such a “spy” has VP, which recently also received from Roland Lombardi, by analogy with the devout Lawrence of Arabia, the informal title of Arabian (Poutine d’Arabie). To do it, it’s enough for western media to add inverted commas when mentioning his nickname.

Speaking out and speaking up in multicultural settings: A two-study examination of cultural intelligence and voice behavior

Adopting a voice instrumentality perspective, we argue that cultural distance between the person speaking up and the voice targets will dampen voice behavior because of uncertainty surrounding what is appropriate and effective voice behavior. We further propose that cultural intelligence (CQ) mitigates this negative relationship and advance a mediated moderation model where the interactive effect of cultural distance and CQ on voice is mediated by perceived voice instrumentality. We test our hypotheses in teams (Study 1) and in supervisor-subordinate dyads in a global organization (Study 2). Results demonstrate that cultural distance is negatively related to speaking up to supervisor (Study 2), but not to speaking out to peers (Study 1). However, across both studies, individuals with low CQ engage in less voice to culturally distant voice targets than those with high CQ. In addition, results of Study 2 support mediated moderation and demonstrate that cultural distance has a negative indirect relationship with voice, via perceived voice instrumentality, only for individuals with low CQ. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our study for voice behavior in culturally diverse settings.

V for Ventriloquism: Powers of Vocal Mimicry in Henry Cockton’s The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, the Ventriloquist

Henry Cockton’s The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, the Ventriloquist (1839–40) proved a phenomenal popular success on first publication, with a cultural afterlife reaching into the mid-twentieth century, but has since fallen into obscurity (perhaps fittingly for a text that thematizes the ephemerality of voice and popular culture). This article reads Valentine Vox as an opportunity for reconceptualizing early Victorian understandings of ventriloquism, identity, and narrative, through three triangulated claims. Firstly, that distant voice ventriloquism challenges conceptions of identity, not only of those whose voices are imitated but also that of the ventriloquist himself. Secondly, that despite this threat to identity, Valentine Vox relies on a notion of selfhood in which identity is guaranteed by teleological narrative. Finally, that in Valentine Vox ventriloquism resists the logic of teleological narrative, stopping its progress to offer a series of comedic sketches (though while Cockton’s contemporary Dickens uses the sketch to portray the kaleidoscopic city, Cockton presents a kind of stasis in the novel’s repetitions). As a result of this triangulation, Valentine Vox is a novel doubled against itself, especially in regard to its conservative stance on popular culture, and which engages in complex ways with issues of mimicry, not least the ways in which the novel pre-empts its own scenes of reading, setting the domestic vocal reader the impossible challenge of mimicking the perfect mimic. Whereas previous readings of the novel have focused on the text’s internal voices, Valentine Vox, I suggest, prompts us to reconsider Victorian practices of reading aloud.

“Center or periphery?”: regional music in contemporary China

Chinese regional cultures have often been viewed as subsidiary to a perceived unified national culture. Implicit in this perspective is the validation of the prestige, power, and authority of the center. This view invariably renders regional cultures insignificance and trivial. A closer look at regional cultures in situ reveals a reality contrary to perceptions held by outsiders. For the locals, regional culture shapes their sense of self and cultural ethos. Using examples of contemporary regional music as lenses, this paper explores what regional music is, what it means to the locals, and its relationship to national music and culture. I suggest that as a domain of culture, music often functions as an emblem for marking identities because of the sentiment and sensibility it evokes. In the post-1949 era, Chinese scholars and musicians often view regional music, “difang yinyue” disparagingly as they attempt to establish a pan-Chinese musical style known as minzu yinyue or minyue. Although acknowledging unique features of various “difang yinyue,” regional music has been treated as an object of exoticism and as flavors used only to enrich their original compositions. The prevailing notion is that regional music–a distant voice from the margin and a sign of backwardness inherited from the past–needs to be developed and brought into the present. Despite this seemingly patronizing attitude and constant criticism, the practice of regional music receives continuous support from the local population and it has witnessed an increase in popularity in recent years. In particular, this paper addresses the question of local identity as manifested in two regional musical traditions, namely Jiangnan Sizhu in Shanghai and Xianshi in the Guangdong Chaozhou area and in Bangkok. The performance of music and musical discourse undoubtedly evolves around the question of identity. Through a discussion of the music and performance practice in these two areas, I argue that the maintenance and continuity of any regional music enables its practitioners to draw a boundary between themselves and others and also provide them with a voice in the state controlled cultural space.

The Perfect Arrangement

The Perfect Arrangement

“Wednesday HIV Clinic”

I. Adverse Reaction “Pray for me,” she asks, her head covered in a polyester scarf. She doesn’t hide herself for shame; she’s lost her hair. We think it was the AZT. She says that through the walls of all her suffering, she thinks she hears God’s distant voice when her young son reads from his new storybook. She’s so proud he’s learning English. “Pray for him,” she asks before she leaves, “that he may have enough to bury me in a fine new white dress!”

Third parties' voices in a therapeutic interview

Drawing on a dialogical approach inspired by Bakhtin, we start from the assumption that a concrete discussion is an intermingling between dialogue in praesentia and dialogue in absentia, and we refer to the notion of “enunciative positioning” to account for the various relations that a speaker may express toward the voices that he or she invokes. Our data are based on a first therapeutic interview between a therapist, a mother, and a child in a counseling center for children and adolescents. We identify the various voices invoked in this interview and show that three levels of discursive process were involved: (a) the speakers invoked absent speakers; (b) at the same time they developed their own discourse on the basis of their interlocutors' discourse which (c) itself drew on absent speakers or voices. We highlight the various discursive processes through which the speakers integrate their own voice into absent voices, or integrate a distant voice so that it loses its property of being a distant (and borrowed) voice. As a theoretical and methodological contribution to dialogism, our results show that absent voices and their specific intermingling with hic et nunc exchanges were a major resource for therapeutic processes.

Electronic Performance Monitoring and Control in Call Centre Industry : An Empirical Study

Call centre is situated at the intersection of several forces namely rapidly expanding information and communication technologies (ICTs), reengineered business processes, a changing (or changed) profile of customer needs and expectations. Call centers are also creating employment opportunities in millions throughout the world. Performance management in call centers is therefore emerging as a widely sensitive issue, affecting both morale and physical potentiality of the employees as well as management issues such as performance control, monitoring and surveillance. As the frontier of technology horizon is changing along with the non-ending dilemma of prioritizing between quantity and quality as performance destinations, adoption of automated and electronically developed monitoring system has become the essential predisposition in call centre industry. This paper attempts to analyze the context, trends and the long term impacts of electronic performance monitoring systems such as automated call distribution system (ADS) , distant voice monitoring technology (DVMT) etc.on call centre workers. This paper is an empirical study on the basis of data .set collected through questionnaire survey. In order to arrive at some specific conclusions the paper has used .some fundamental statistical techniques like Chi- square Test, Contingency coefficient. Two way ANOVA, and concept of Mathematical Expectation etc.

"Be my inscape, be my lyre": The Hymnody of Albert Stewart

FEATURED AUTHOR—ALBERT STEWART "Be my inscape, be my lyre": The Hymnody of Albert Stewart________ Marianne Worthington To read the poems of Albert Stewart is to consider his organic religiosity, a blended spiritual view or his own making. Stewart mixes Greek mythology, Biblical free verse, medieval mysticism, British Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, and the folkways of his Knott County, Kentucky neighbors like a great stew, flavored with a pantheistic theology and a fervor for the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of nature. Stewart's poetry is not always easy or forthcoming; his early work often contains indirection and veiled allusion, inverted syntax, and obtrusive, sentimental descriptors that make for a stilted and distant voice. Generally, however, it's worth the dig because Stewart is a poet with a keen eye and an inquisitive nature; a poet who celebrates and laments the human condition; a poet dedicated to the medieval notion of finding the sacred while in the midst of the profane. In many ways, Stewart's poems can be likened to hymns in that they are lyric offerings that express a theological point of view, a heightened imagination, and passion and reverence for the sublime. We may not be able literally to sing his poems, but Stewart was aware of the need for congregational song: "I am looking / For the one to whom it must be told," he writes in "The Holy Season." We might think of Stewart's poetry as lyric containers for his invocations, confessions, praises, petitions, litanies, and creeds. Albert Stewart was 86 years old when he died in April, 2001. He left us only three volumes of poetry, but many Kentucky writers name him as their literary mentor in one way or another. No doubt, his classical training at the Settlement School and his education at Berea College and the University of Kentucky offered him opportunities beyond Yellow Mountain, his home place in Knott County. He served three years in the navy during World War II and taught at high schools in northern Kentucky and southern Ohio and at Morehead State University, University of Kentucky and Alice Lloyd College. Yet he always returned to Yellow Mountain, and most of his poems are rooted there. 25 In 1962, Morehead State College Press published Stewart's first collection, The Untoward Hills. Twenty-five years later, it republished a facsimile edition. In 1993, Berea College Press published Stewart's second collection, The Holy Season: Walking in the Wild. In 1996, Limited Editions Press published A Man of Circumstance & Selected Yellow Mountain Poems 1946-1996. The Untoward Hills is marked in obvious and subtle ways as a spiritual journey. The first section, "The Hills of a Child" features poems where the solitary and lonely childhood on a mountain farm is centered around loss. The poet begins to look to nature as a substitute for parental guidance (Stewart was sent to live at the Hindman Settlement School at age five after the death of his mother) and as a way of knowing the world. The title poem of this section is a representative example of Stewart's epistemology of nature and of his poetic style. It is reprinted on page 8 of this magazine. Here we see not only the poetic tension of the bright "little lives" of insects and children being contrasted with the coming dark, but also some of the hallmarks of Stewart's early style and influences: the use of end rhyme but with irregular meter, allegiance to the Romantic notion of human activity conditioned by nature, and a fondness for Biblical cadence, as in the second stanza above. The knowledge of "bright things gone away" is emphasized in the next section of this collection. "The Outlying Hills" contains elegies and tributes that are pensive and sensitive responses to death and the passing of time. In "Mountain Funeral," for instance, a family prepares a coffin that Stewart describes in a hymn-like meter: Of curly pine from off the height This coffin shall be made To house the frugal shade Of one who fled into the hills of light. They praise with zeal the morbid shade In weeping and in psalm And have the bitter coffin made To guide the...

Samuel Beckett's Rockaby : Dramatizing the Plight of the Solitary Elderly at Life's End

Irish playwright Samuel Beckett's spare, compact, and provocative play Rockaby (1981) is a study in old age, isolation, and disengagement from life. In it, an elderly woman rocks in a chair while the audience hears a distant voice remembering her lifelong search for human contact or communion. The play dramatizes the woman's intense physical and psychological isolation and the last sputterings of her impulse to narrate. Such radical isolation may be a necessary precondition for a person relinquishing the narrating that Beckett equates with being, and surrendering unto death. Despite its apparent simplicity, the play powerfully explores the nature of aging in contemporary society, quality-of-life issues for the frail, solitary elderly in our communities and health-care institutions, and how the elderly prepare for life's end in a death-denying culture. Rockaby is thus a text that can help clinicians and other caregivers appreciate the predicament of solitary elderly persons nearing life's end and better understand how we all must manage one day the lonely, self-abnegating yet also paradoxically self-assertive act of dying.

Psych 101, Revisited

Psych 101, Revisited Curtis Smith (bio) I didn't usually claim my three-year-old from his twice-weekly preschool sessions, but my wife had chipped a tooth, and both this week and next, I was to pick up our boy while she sat white-knuckled in the dentist's peculiarly angled chair. A warm spell, early March, and the first curious shoots of lilies and daffodils had poked their green nubs into winter-brown flower beds. I'd snuck in a short, up-tempo run after work, and when I spotted the children on the school's fenced-in playground, I was relieved I wouldn't have to wait in the narrow hallway outside his classroom and subject the other parents to my stink. The play area sat atop a tiny hill. A number of parents had already arrived, and as was custom, one of the aides guarded the exit, calling for the children one at a time, the gate squeaking open and shut as she bid each child goodbye. Behind her, a boy emerged from a plastic-tube tunnel, his hair puffed in a staticy display. Two girls peeked out the windows of a princess's castle. And in the nearest corner, I spotted my son's yellow and blue coat. I smiled at the sight of him, the unruly mop of his fine blond hair, the jacket he insisted on unzipping the moment it was put on, but as I neared, an unwelcome scene came into focus—my boy roughly yanking a classmate from a little plastic car. The other boy cried, but his shrieks were muffled by the twisted coat my son had pulled over his head. With a final huff, my son extracted him, and the other boy's rear end landed with a soft thud on the playground's woodchip surface. My first inclination was to reach over the fence and snag my own fistful of coat, but his teacher was standing nearby, gently addressing both boys, so I swallowed my mortification while trying to avoid the gazes of the other parents. Kneeling to his level, the teacher offered my son another car. She swung the door open, and my boy took the bait, pushing off and abandoning the scene of his transgression, his victim still sobbing, his coat and hair dotted with woodchips. I smiled apologetically as the aide handed him out to his mother. [End Page 95] Ever since being exposed to the nature versus nurture debate in freshman psych, I'd been a regular Henry Higgins, an ardent believer in the tabula rosa, that personality is merely human clay shaped by experiences and environment. Yet here was my child—a boy whose TV viewing had been carefully monitored, who'd fallen asleep to classical music every night since coming home from the hospital, who'd only heard my tweaked Goldilocks story, one that ended with the three bears exchanging hugs with the poor lost girl they'd helped out of the woods—assuming the role of playground bully. Only two children remained in the fenced-in area when my turn came at the gate. I asked my boy's teacher about his day's behavior. They've all been a bit rambunctious, she said, offering an exhausted sigh. It's probably the weather. On the ride home, I twisted the rearview and delivered my familiar speech about pushing and grabbing and sharing, and in his most distant voice, my son echoed the answers we'd trained him to give—sharing is good, grabbing and pushing are bad. I offered a new twist, the trying to imagine what it would be like to be the boy pulled roughly out of a car, but my son just stared blankly out at the window's sun-flickering scene. * * * Before becoming a father, I'd envisioned a child's milestones differently. I thought of birthdays, heights notched on a kitchen doorway. I pictured first steps, first words . . . and true, such events are noteworthy, but they're also expected, and what's touched me most have been the surprises, the unexpected gems that have arisen organically from the chaos of his days. The frustrated artist in...

1 and 2 Chronicles. Vol. 2, 2 Chronicles 10-36: Guilt and Atonement

I 2 Chronicles. Vol. 1, 1 Chronicles 1-2 Chronicles 9: Israel's Place Among Nations, by William Johnstone. JSOTSup 253. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997. Pp. 411. N.P. 1 2 Chronicles. Vol. 2, 2 Chronicles 10-36: Guilt Atonement, by William Johnstone. JSOTSup 254. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997. Pp. 300. N.P. Given explosion of academic study of biblical text, classical critical philological commentaries have tended to become scribal affairs. Unless commentator is extremely diligent, contemporary scholarship, rather than biblical text itself, becomes main dialogue partner for commentator-and reader of commentary. The length of commentaries grows, yet biblical text itself becomes a more distant voice, submerged beneath cacophony of contemporary discussions. William Johnstone seeks to avoid this dilemma is his 700 plus page commentary on 1 2 Chronicles by selectively engaging contemporary scholarship essentially forgoing a scholarly apparatus as he presents his reading of Chronicles to his audience. Yet his intent is not to present a postmodern exercise in ideology of reading; Johnstone seeks to write the inductive description of material in work itself, written with as few preconceptions as possible about what theme or themes may turn out to (vol. 1, p. 377). He methodically utilizes a concordance to trace use of language within Chronicles rest of Hebrew Bible, especially Leviticus, to construct message of text, while comparing Chronicles to its Vorlage in Samuel-Kings. Johnstone helpfully summarizes his basic reading of Chronicles in introductions to each volume (vol. 1, pp. 9-23; vol. 2, pp. 9-20). The bulk of commentary develops general hypothesis that historiographic genre of Chronicles masks its deeper function as a theological work related to midrash, written for the edification of community (vol. 1, p. 23). According to Johnstone, in 1 Chronicles 1-9, Chronicler spells out universal of God humanity, how Israel finds its place amidst nations in response to breakdown of this relationship. 1 Chronicles 10-2 Chronicles 9 presents Israel attempting to achieve its ideal amidst nations, sacramentally representing sovereignty of God amidst nations through Davidic dynasty. Yet even here, failure is seen on horizon. As a consequence, 2 Chronicles 10-36 engages exilic situation of Chronicler's original audience to understand Israel's failure and to look beyond it to conditions for eventual recognition of God's sovereignty on earth, which will solve problem of relationship betwen God human with which work began (vol. 2, p. 11). The Chronicler thus subordinates Jerusalemite royal tradition to levitical theology of Temple its rites in anticipation of eschatological fulfillment of God's sacramental sovereignty exercised over all creation. Despite Johnstone's claim to investigate inductively Chronicles with minimal presuppositions, his reading operates with a very strong, conservative, questionable MT bias. Indeed, he produces a commentary on MT of Chronicles, confusing it with its textual predecessors. Johnstone consistently works with MT paragraphing as significant to his interpretation; textual criticism in work is basically nonexistent-the MT as textus receptus is judged to be historically superior. More seriously, he rejects Qumran textual evidence for Vorlage of Chronicles in his redactional comments, arguing that the reader is presented with two given texts-Samuel-Kings C-and these two texts will endure as received texts for interpretation. …

A voice switch control method for efficient blocking prevention

In the voice switch control process, it is difficult to distinguish between an outgoing voice and an incoming voice echo returned from the speaker to the microphone. In a high speed voice switch, immediately after the incoming voice signal became silent the echo is identified as the outgoing voice and transmitted to the distant terminal. Because of the loss incorporated in the receiving side, the output from the subsequent incoming voice of the speaker will be cut off, a process called incoming blocking. Moreover, the echo transmitted to the distant terminal flips the distant voice switch to the receiving side, thus causing blocking of the outgoing voice and preventing subsequent voice transmission from the person at the distant terminal to the near terminal. In the method proposed here, a transition state is established as a temporary control state between the sending state and the receiving state, with the current speech direction prioritized. When the voice becomes silent, then the voice switch is transferred into the transition state. Then the control system immediately restores the switch back to the original speech state. © 1998 Scripta Technica, Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 81(8): 52–63, 1998

The life of William Faulkner: a critical biography

Introduction: fictions of history - an approach to Faulkner. Part 1 On privacy: Faulkner and the human subject history as autobiography - the world of Faulkner autobiography as history - the life of Faulkner. Part 2 Faulkner the apprentice: trying out different voices - the early prose and poetry of loss and longing - soldier's pay and mosquitoes. Part 3 Rewriting the homeplace: ancestor worship, patricide and the epic past - flags in the dust and sartoris voices, absence and cultural autobiography - Sound of the Fury a Southern carnival - As Lay Dying and woman was invented - Sanctuary. Part 4 Of past and present conflicts: language, power and the verbal community - Light in August the virile pilot and the seductions of the aitr - Pylon history is what hurts - Absalom, Absalom! the plantation romance and the madwoman in the attic - Unvanquished. Part 5 Public faces and private places: now about these women - Wild Palms let's make a deal - Hamlet things fall apart - Go Down, Moses watching the detectives - Intruder in the Dust. Part 6 The way home: finished and unfinished business - Knight's Gambit and Requiem For Nun of crowds, control and courage - A Fable distant voice, desperate lives - Towns then the letting go - Mansion. Postscript - back to Earth: the romance of the family- Reivers I was Here - Faulkner family tree.

Autonomy and Credibility: Voice as Method

Although little noticed by practicing theorists, narrative voice influences theoretical work. This essay presents a demonstration of voice as method, concentrating on brief segments of works by Garfinkel and Goffman. We attend to two methodological themes: how theorists use voice to establish intellectual autonomy, and how the use of voice influences credibility with readers. Garfinkel maximizes his autonomy by using narrative techniques that isolate him from his readers, and produce little common context with them as a result. Goffman maintains a context for credibility with his readers by using a personal voice, but he uses this voice to request their indulgence as he follows his autonomous muse. Goffman's narrative self-indulgence prevents him from fashioning a coherent theoretical program for his readers, something Garfinkel's distant voice enables him to achieve.