Within Pamala Z’s lecture, many things stood out to me. In particular, her confidence and ideas of using the human voice within composition spoke to me. I loved this section as it inspired me to think about using vocals as the main source in the future.
Within her piece ‘Breathing’, she uses just her own voice to create the entire piece by manipulating and mixing her voice through a 21 channel self-made sound installation. How she used the breathe throughout stuck with me. It became extremely emotional and peeled back the human voice to its rarest form. Her instincts to include breath provoked such emotion that certain instruments can not. I have used voice in the past within my work however I have never manipulated and layered it to create a solo piece in the way Pamala did. I hope to do this in the future and isolate only vocals to create an entire sound piece.
Within another performance, Pamala used a score of different vocals to create different sounds melodies and harmonies. By isolating just the voice as the main instrument; the lines between art and reality became blurred. It was as if human instincts and nature were manipulated into music and sound. I found this beautiful as it supported the concept of art and reality being not so far apart after all. The way the voices intertwined with one another sounded to me like water in the brain.
One of the sounds reminded me greatly of the song “The Great Gig In The Sky” by pink Floyd. Where the voice is used as the soul of the song and the main instrument throughout. Despite cultural changes and traditions; the human voice stands as the most universal instrument we as a society can share. Sounds can be used as a multilingual language and can provoke emotions that speak universally.