Since childhood, I’ve been experimenting with voice and language. Our voices are phenomena of deep habit - which also makes them potent playgrounds for self-inquiry.
This post explores a handful of my experiments in this extremely fertile realm and provides one for you to try as well.
In 2022, the Center for Deep Listening (CDL), which champions the work of Pauline Oliveros, put out a call for one-page deep listening scores.
Composers were to create directions for individuals or groups to enter into novel meditative explorations of the realms of sound-making and whole body listening.
I first learned of the work of Pauline Oliveros in a class taught by multi-instrumental improvisor and composer Anthony Braxton called Women in Creative Music. At the time I was a music student at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.
One day in class, Braxton played the track Alien Bog for us. Something important and new was happening in my body. The way that Oliveros’s sound world resonated inside led to the emergence of a new vision of my internal landscape.
Many years later, I was delighted to finally find and purchase Oliveros’s book, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. I have often led participants in my programs through her Extreme Slow Walk exercise, which comes with the following explanation:
“…the purpose of the exercise is to challenge your normal pattern or rhythm of walking so that you can learn to reconnect with very subtle energies in the body as the weight shifts from side to side in an extremely slow walk.”
I contributed a score for a piece entitled Language as Melody to the 2022 CDL project. Riffing on the note about the Extreme Slow Walk above, my score was designed to
…help performers and listeners reconnect with the subtle musical energies of human speech through the recitation of “beautiful sentences,” vocalized via call and response by pairs of performers , with musical a-ttention and in-tention to the timing of speech and silence.
Language as Melody was included as Day 29 of the compilation A Year of Deep Listening, published by the Center for Deep Listening in 2023.
I provided the following short bio:
Seth Dellinger is a life-long experimentalist, speaker of tongues, Feldenkrais practitioner, and creator of the Musicality of Being workshops.
Language as Melody:
Many readers choose “one beautiful sentence” each from a cherished book.
To prepare, each reader chants the line repeatedly to discover its musicality.
Then readers meet in pairs or trios, chanting for each other
so everyone can feel the music of each voice in their body.
They then rehearse call and response, finding a shared pulse.
Then all readers read together, slowly.
The call and response of each pair or trio is preserved.
Silences between voices are extended for the sake of listening.
Any word may be pronounced one letter at a time.
Any word may be spoken or sung.
Here is an excerpt from a 2023 online Musicality of Being workshop where participants enacted something similar to the scene imagined in my score.
After the “performance” (first 4 minutes of video), participants share their experiences of practicing this embodied game of musical relationality.
One latecoming “audience member” who only listened commented:
“It doesn’t have to be that you are talking over each other - it didn’t feel like that.
It felt more harmonious to me, that everyone was having their say. But there was a way in which it was so connected that I could feel the unity of it. It didn’t feel disjointed or jarring.”
My previous post, To Do List, is another example of my interest in experimenting with the musicality of everyday speech.
During the years I was around Braxton and participating in the vibrant experimental community in his orbit, I created a series of ‘mantras’ by reordering and embellishing the syllables of the names of many loved ones.
The first one I made, of course, came from the name of my girlfriend at that time.
I thought she had a very pretty name.
Where are you now, Crystal Haviland?
Jyen younyui ehtyo
Jyetonash tyanovil
Krisan maratalan
Jovyoonday jovyoondah
Not long ago a graduate from my online coaching program, Grounded Connection, told me that just before going into an important job interview she sat in her car and followed my guided vocal imaging practice Alphabet Soup.
She said it was very helpful for allowing her to show up for this interaction in connection with what felt like her authentic voice.
This practice involves reciting the alphabet many times with many variations, including with the mouth closed. Sometimes the lips are allowed to move, but not the teeth. Other times it’s the other way around. The original version of this experiment was an Awareness Through Movement lesson created by Moshe Feldenkrais.
Recording provided below for your experimentation.
If you would like to learn more about the Grounded Connection program, click here