Tracing the Development of Extended Vocal Techniques in ...

and record player, the tape recorder stored the information on magnetic tape opening up a
world of new possibilities of the use of EVTs.
Vocal Implications
In addition to these technologies, the appearance of numerous electronic studios
and the French musique concrète 65 fueled the fires of the avant-garde. Steven Connor,
author of the article “The Decomposing Voice of Postmodern Music,” further explained:
With the development of recording and amplification technologies at the end of
the nineteenth century, the division between "classical" or serious music and mass
music began to take shape. However, both modern mass music and modernist
music grew out of the encounter between the ideal of the free, expressive, bodily
voice, and the captured, manipulable, disembodied voice of the phonograph and
the telephone. The mass market in sound and music that rapidly grew up through
the twentieth century, sustained by the technologies of amplification and
reproduction, was centered on the human voice. Even more important perhaps
than the gramophone's power to store and propagate the human voice was the
power given by the microphone, which was the guarantee of the voice's integrity
against the powers of "music," which was now diminished to the mere frame or
occasion for the singer and his or her song. The voice became a powerful and
marketable commodity. 66
The preservation of sound on magnetic tape considerably affected the use of the human
voice through musique concréte, influencing further development in the realm of EVTs.
For example, the American composer Richard Maxfield “collected 30 seconds of coughs
65 Do I need to explain this? April 1948 in Paris by Pierre Schaeffer, a French radio engineer,
“Experimenting with the newly invented magnetic tape, he found that a heterogeneous collection of songs,
noises, conversations, radio commercials, etc. recorded on tape, presented a realistic phonomontage which
may serve for actual composition by superimposing fragments of tape recordings in a polyphony of random
sounds, splicing the tape in various way, running it at different speeds, or backwards, etc”
66 Steven Conner, “The Decomposing Voice of Postmodern Music,” New Literary History 32,
(2001): 469.
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