Murmurnation

My performance practice was born in the personal endeavor to reconcile the improvised speaking voice with the improvisational musical discourse I engage in with others.  Simply acknowledging a pre-lexical origin in both speech and music is enough at times to stop wondering and carry on with work, but at other times I find myself obsessively distracted by an unfolding music derived from the words of a new acquaintance of a new dialect.  Accents are systematically composed of different characters, tendencies and emotions.  Individuals exist independently from one another, but the solidity and replicated nature of local phonologies offers an unexplored world of meaningful Irish characters, musically illustrated through the restrictions of localised musical aesthetics.  Voices around me continue to influence my own voice and thoughts.  The improvisatory nature of my saxophone practice leads me to 'speak Cork' when in Schull, 'Dublinese' when there...

As I increasingly travel for new performances, I am inevitably caught out by the changing and systematic character of the Irish accent.  The music in community voices at each destination has a singularity of origin.  Less malleable people I engage with sound forth with an overwhelming musicality which distracts and invades, stays and reemerges later in my own improvised speech given the slightest trigger.  

My creative process now uses the arrangement of speech and music spatially (through the placement of up to 32 loudspeakers), I see the potential to better understand the nature of speech melody through the localisation of musical elements or the mapping and animation of regional and non-native accents in the immersive audio performance space.      

JOURNEYING

Throughout 2018/19 I will be collecting Irish speech samples through recorded conversations with native and non-native speakers of English across the Island of Ireland.  The lexical, conversational in quality, brings the pooling of contributors ideas and views on the 'contemporary Irish accent'.  New immersive audio work for multi-tracked saxes and voices will emerge through the editing and spatial mixing of this material for music performance-installation.  

The title-pun of this blog evokes the flocking of birds.  The disembodiment and transitory nature of collective voice in this immersive audio work may come to relate some of the music derived from of our attachment to and detachment from the land, from our immigration or plantation to it,  and our tendency to connect with each other over time.   

Cathal Roche kindly acknowledges the support of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Music Bursary Award, 2018.