Issues: 3. Dramaturgical Voice

DON IDHE – Listening and Voice - phenomenologies of sound

And so my Sound Theatre aims to do is establish an auditory horizon for the minds ears to wander within – eg SFM CJA. But more interestingly each individual audience brings themselves to the composition. In a sense my imaginings of Antarctica are not yours, and even though I have been to Antarctica, this does not make them any more vivid or based on reality.


“Dramaturgical Voice stands between the enchantment of music, which can wordlessly draw us into the sound so deeply that the sound overwhelms us, as the conversation of ordinary speech, which gives way to a trivial transparency that hides its sounded significance.

“The Dramaturgical Voice amplifies the musical “effect” of speech. This heightens the significance of the word that has been spoken.”

“In the Dramaturgical Voice … the sounding voice is amplified … the word event is an occasion of significance that is elevated above the ordinary” (cinema, radio, the pulpit)

In dramaturgical voice there is united in the same moment the fullness of sound and of significance as a paradigm of embodied word.

It is this notion of embodiment

“A phenomenology of the voice is in this sense not only a return to the center of embodied meaning within sound but a return to the existential voice, to the speaking and listening that occurs with humankind. In the voice of embodied significance lies the what of the saying, the who of the saying and the I to whom something is being said.”

In Technics and Praxis (1979) and Technology and the Lifeworld (1990) Idhe analyses the process and experience of embodiment of people with technology and instruments (scientific and musical). He describes how musicians “speak” through material artefacts or instruments – in a sense their “voice” is amplified and could therefore be described as a Dramaturgical Voice especially in relation to the following:


“The Dramaturgical Voice also amplifies the phenomenon of the auditiry aura of the presence of the other [previously mentioned]. The actor [musician] amplifies the sounding voice, he projects voice into the recesses of the theatre. This resonant voice is an auditory aura that im-presses in sound. The auditor is merely metaphorically im-pressed, but the perception of the other in voice he experiences the embodiment of the other as one who fills the auditorium with his presence.” (pp172)