ESPACIO ACUSTICO

Richard Kostelanetz

The art is text-sound, as distinct from text-print and text-seen, which is to say that texts must be sounded and thus heard to be "read," in contrast to those that must be printed and thus be seen. The art is text-sound, rather than sound-text, to acknowledge the initial presence of a text, which is subject to aural enhancements more typical of music. To be precise, it is by non-melodic auditory structures that language or verbal sounds are poetically charged with meanings or resonances they would not otherwise have. The most appropriate generic term for the initial materials would be "vocables," which my dictionary defines as "a word regarded as a unit of sounds or letters rather than as a unit of meaning." As text-sound is an intermedium located between language arts and musical arts, its creators include artists who initially established themselves as "writers," "poets," "composers," and "painters" in their text-sound works, they are, of course, functioning as text-sound artists. Many do word-image art (or "visual poetry") as well, out of a commitment to exploring possibilities in literary intermedia.

The term "text-sound" characterizes language whose principal means of coherence is sound, rather than syntax or semantics - where the sounds made by comprehensible words create their own coherence apart from denotative meanings A simple example would be this "tongue- twister" familiar from childhood:

If a Hottentot taught a Hottentot tot to talk 'ere the tot could totter, ought the Hottentot to be taught to say ought or naught or what ought to be taught 'er?

The subject of this ditty is clearly neither Hottentots nor pedagogy but the related sounds of "or' and "ought," and what holds this series of words together is not the thought or the syntax but those two repeated sounds. It is those sounds that one primarily remembers after hearing this sentence read aloud. As in other text-sound art, this language is customarily recited in a voice that speaks, rather than sings. Thus, the vocal pitches are non-specific.

The first exclusionary distinction then is that words that have intentional pitches, or melodies, are not text-sound art but song. To put it differently, text-sound art may include recognizable words or phonetic fragments, but once musical pitches are introduced, or musical instruments are added (and once words are tailored to a pre-existing melody or rhythm), the results are music and are experienced as such. Secondly, text-sound art differs from "oral poetry," which is syntactically standard language written to be read aloud. These exclusions give the art a purist definition, I admit, but without these distinctions, there is no sure way of separating text-sound art, the true intermedium, from music on the one side and poetry on the other.

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