1. Sound-Text

2. Marie Osmond recites Dada poet, Hugo Ball’s Karawane
Initially we will look at the confluence of literature/”narrative” and sound.
Dada Poetry and Concrete Poetry
These poets thought about how the words sounded more so than what they meant if anything. Dada movement engendering works that are transrational.
Listening to these poems, you’ll hear invented words, neologisms, fragments; in short, the whole of what came to be later known as “sound poetry”
For it [the performance of ] Ball place his texts on music stands scattered all over the podium and turned from one to another during the performance, raising and lowering the cardboard “wings” of his costume.
From
Marie Osmond recites Dada poet, Hugo Ball’s Karawane

3. Richard Kostelanetz Epiphanies Part 2, 1982-1992
Listen to the first 4 minutes of the video, Epiphanies Part 2.
Epiphanies is a large number of single-sentence stories that are given individual settings.
Below is Kostelanz’s explanation of the project as part of a proposal for a film.
In James Joyce's theory of the short story, we remember, the epiphany is the encompassing climactic moment that functions to illuminate the entire story. In my own stories, likewise entitled Epiphanies, I have tried to suggest the same momentous quality within a single sentence, which is to say that my epiphanies are meant to be so evocatively sufficient that the remainder of the story, neither ahead nor behind, need not be told. Collected together, these climactic moments (within otherwise nonexistent stories) provoke a fictional experience that is not linear, but spatial; not sequential, but thoroughly discontinuous; not nineteenth-century, but twentieth. No story in Epiphanies is more important than any other; no story is intentionally connected to another. In context, none is merely transitional. Another aim was to exploit the freedoms of its open-ended form to touch upon the fullest range of human experience--to write perhaps the most universal fiction ever written.
Kostelanetz goes on to envision the piece as having up to 50 different actors and have a duration of up to 4 hours. It would be projected in a public space where the audience could come and watch for a time, rather than watch in its entirety.
From Proposal Towards Installation of

4. Christian Bok, Eunoia, Chapter E, 2001, book, e-book and recording
Listen to Chapter E from Eunoia and then show the online Flash text excerpt.
Christian Bok created a series of poems called Eunoia
The main section of the book consists of five chapters: "A", "E", "I", "O" and "U". In each of these chapters, the only vowel used is the same one as the title. For example, in Chapter A, the only vowel used is "A". There are other rules given to each of the chapters.
Each of the chapters must refer to the art of writing.[5]
Each of the chapters has "to describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage."[5]
All the sentences must have an "accented internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism."[6]
The text must include as many words as possible.[6]
The text must avoid repeating words as much as possible.[6]
The letter "Y" is unused.
From
Christian Bok, Eunoia, Chapter E, 2001, book, e-book and recording
See the online Flash version of the book

5. Henri Chopin, Peche de Nuit, 1957-59, sound poem and film by Luc Peire (1963)
This was made on a worn out second hand tape recorder. Chopin is a pioneer in exploring the use of voice in electronic art/music, particularly voice and body sounds, vocal grains, hisses, clicks, labial snaps, vibrations of the larynx, etc. In Pêche de Nuit Chopin used voice as a sound source for concrete manipulations disregarding semantics. His works were often regarded as musique concrète rather than sound art, sound poetry, or text-sound despite their primary use of voice as the only sound source. Chopin described his work as poesie-sonore (poetic sound) which is quite different in focus from sound poetry.
From
The piece also became the soundtrack for the a film of the same name by Luc Peire.

6. Wojciech Bruszewski, Yyaa, 1973
YYAA, a 3-minute long primal scream in which changes in light exposure modulate the soundtrack. He sought to experiment with the relationship between synchronous sound and image.
From
This film has also been described as a cry from the heart rather than the brain, a cry of emotion rather than reason.
Wojciech Bruszewski, Yyaa, 1973

7. George Brecht, Drip Music, 1959
Query students about what is Fluxus. They should have been exposed to this in WARP. Drip Music is a Fluxus piece, again another example of sound being created based on a preplanned system.
For single or multiple performance. A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel.
Fluxversion 1. Performer on a ladder pours water from a pitcher very slowly down into the bell of a French horn or tuba held in playing position by a second performer at floor level.
Ben Patterson who performed the piece in 2002 said,
Thus, I discovered that George Brecht’s original instructions for Drip Music allowed for both a single source or multiple sources of dripping water. Remembering Georges first career as a chemist, employing laboratory equipment to produce multiple, dripping sources seemed appropriate. A device was constructed including 3 gerbil water bottles suspended from metal rods and a piece of molded plastic packaging, amplified with contact microphone. Only micro adjustments were made to provide differing drip frequencies. No electro-acoustic manipulations or editorial tricks."
From
George Brecht, Drip Music, 1959

8. Chris Burden, Atomic Alphabet, 1980, print and performance
Burden initially presented The Atomic Alphabet as a shouted recitation. In the performance, he yelled, “A for Atomic, B for Bomb, C for Catastrophe” and so on, with each letter punctuated by a raised fist and a foot-stomp. The chant ended with a terse cry of “Yeh! Yeh! Yeh!” The presentation lasted for 30 seconds.
From
He dressed in leather and punctuated each letter with an angry stomp.
From
Chris Burden, Atomic Alphabet, 1980, print and performance

9. Laurie Anderson, O Superman, 1981, performance/recording
The piece is based on an opera, Le Cid, by Jules Massanet. The Ha Ha part is created with an Eventide Harmonizer, a device that shifts the pitch. The text is spoken through a vocoder. The other sounds are sampled.
Laurie Anderson, O Superman, 1981, performance/recording

10. Vito Acconci, Running Tape, 1969, audiotape
Play 5-10 minutes of this piece.
In the sound piece Running Tape (1969) Acconci runs through New York’s Central park, counting every single step and recording his voice as he runs. His heavy breathing illustrates his effort.
Cassette recorder on my belt, microphone in my hand. Running, and counting each step as a I run. (When I have to — when my words get jumbled, when I’m out of breath - I stop and breathe into the microphone, catching my breath, until I can continue my run, continue my count.)[1]
Running Tape is an endurance piece that Acconci made in New York's Central Park on August 26, 1969, as one of a series of what he terms "tape situations." This piece relates to Acconci's performance and film works of the same period.
Acconci describes the process of this piece as follows: "Cassette recorder on my belt, microphone in my hand. Running, and counting each step as a I run. (When I have to — when my words get jumbled, when I'm out of breath — I stop and breathe into the microphone, catching my breath, until I can continue my run, continue my count.)"
From

11. “The beginning of a remake of an earlier work [Soundings, 1979] in which I wanted to extend the reflexivity of each text in relation to the interaction between different physical substances—in this case, sand—and the speaker cone. A loudspeaker fills the screen and I begin to speak, referring to the speaker itself. This is followed by more declarations of what I am doing, ‘…a hand enters the picture….’ A hand filled with sand enters the picture and slowly releases it into the loudspeaker’s cone. Every nuance of speech vibrates the speaker’s cone (or membrane), bouncing the grains of sand into the air. The more I speak about what is happening, the more it changes—or feeds back into—the movement and patterns of the sand. At times the grain of the voice seemingly merges with what is experienced as ‘sand.’ The hand allows more and more sand to trickle onto the loudspeaker until the cone is no longer visible. The timbre of the voice crackles and is radically muffled. When the speaker is completely buried, the voice sounds distant but remarkably clear.” - Gary Hill
From An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings, by George Quasha and Charles Stein (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2009)
Gary Hill, Mediations (toward a remake of Soundings) 1979/1986, Video (color, stereo sound), Original format: U-matic, 4’17”
Color video camera/recorder, two microphones, audio mixer, speaker and sand

12. Patrick Craig Manning, 44 Meaningful Sounds, 2008
44 Meaningful Sounds derives its name from the number of meaningful sounds (or phonemes) in the English (American) language. Each sound was extracted from representative words in order to obtain as closely as possible the way it might vary slightly from the beginning or end of a word to its interior. These sounds have been assembled into a library and are played back in random order using an algorithm designed to mimic the consonant and vowel patterns of the English language. I am curious about the effects of randomness and the ways it can be wielded as a tool to upset our expectations and create representations that defy predictable meaning. While most of my work plays with or against language, 44 Meaningful Sounds is the first to directly engage with systems of linguistic representation.
From
Patrick Craig Manning, 44 Meaningful Sounds, 2008
Speaker, stand, computer, custom software, amplifier

13. Sound Portraits http://www.soundportraits.org/
Story Corps
This American Life
Radiolab
Both of these sites are listed for reference and as sites of compilations. Each site houses the home page for a radio show of contemporary documentary narrative that has synergies with performance art.
Sound Portraits
Sound Portraits' radio documentaries (broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered and Weekend Edition) are audio profiles of men and women surviving in the margins. Told with care and dignity, the work depicts the lives of Americans living in communities often neglected or misunderstood. Sound Portraits frequently collaborates with people living in these hard-to-access corners of America, giving them tape recorders and microphones and helping them tell their own stories.
Sound Portraits is known not just for its cutting-edge radio documentaries but also for its innovative approaches to disseminating ideas, sparking discussion, and broadening the national debate on such issues as poverty, juvenile justice, prison, and race.
Listen 7:57 of My Last Mile.
The current incarnation of Sound Portraits is StoryCorp which you can hear usually once a week on NPR.
This American Life
Another radio documentary show--listen to the about 7 minutes of Dead Men Tell No Tales.
Radiolab

14. Invisible 5 Audio Project, 2006
Invisible-5 investigates the stories of people and communities fighting for environmental justice along the I-5 corridor, through oral histories, field recordings, found sound, recorded music, and archival audio documents. The project also traces natural, social, and economic histories along the route.
Invisible 5 Audio Project, 2006

15. Erik Belgum, Bad Marriage Mantra, 1993, audiotape
“The best masking material for human voices is other human voices.”
                                                                   - Information Security, Inc.
From Erik Belgum’s website
My wife and I listened through the wall to a spectacular verbal fight in the room next door to us in a Toronto hotel. It lasted through the late evening and most of the night. The argument, although you could scarcely call it that for no points were ever made or countered, had a great deal in common with many musical and literary traditions: the use of intense but slightly varied repetitions coupled with sparsely chosen materials. Bad Marriage Mantra is not a reenactment of this fight, but a stylized realization of a different fight with the same deep structure. It goes like this: THE HUSBAND. THE WIFE. THE BAD MARRIAGE MANTRA.
From
Although the specific words were not audible, the fight seemed to have a rhythm of its own; there were crescendos and lulls, booms then whispers—not unlike the work of many of the greatest orchestral pieces. Phrases and sounds repeated themselves in almost predictable cycles. It went on for hours, without conclusion or closure. In the end, Belgum never found out who they were or what they were screaming about.
He took the whole experience and made a sound work out of it. Bad Marriage Mantra is Belgum’s brilliantly disturbing transformation of this irritating experience into a post-minimalist operetta. He got two actors into a studio and let them go at each other at the top of their lungs. The only lyrics are “Fuck you, you stupid prick!!!” or “Shut up!!” or “When I say shut up you’d better listen you stupid fucking bitch!!,” etc. for an hour. At first, it’s shocking; then, it’s funny. After a while, it’s really annoying. But finally, however, about a half hour into the disc you begin get the point—you start paying less attention to the words themselves and begin hearing the “music” in the midst of this hysterical onslaught.
From

16. Sean Landers, The Man Within, 2000, audio
Listen to part of this piece.
Listen to On the Work of Sean Landers

17. Patrick Craig Manning, Speak/Spoken, 2005-2006
Speak/Spoken was a commissioned public art project. For one year, From September of 2005 though August of 2006, videos of randomly encountered people speaking about whatever they desired were projected under the West St. Bridge 24 hours a day. Speak/Spoken was site specific and engaged the purgatorial location between the traffic above and the water below, suspending figures on screens that stretched from the bottom of the canal to the underside of the bridge. The sounds of the people speaking overlapped in time and echoed into the space mixing with the traffic of the city overhead. Over the course of the year, oil stained water dripped down onto the screens deliberately placed under the seam in the bridge above, staining them.
From
Patrick Craig Manning, Speak/Spoken,
Commissioned Public Art project – Indianapolis