Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century By Andrew Ki ...

Chapter Outline

The first chapter of seven, “Vocal Origins,” presents a brief chronology of human evolution that emphasizes the development of vocal anatomy, vocal expression, and language. Many disciplines study human origins, such as anthropology, paleontology, neurology, and biology, and the chapter discusses evolutionary theories of voice that resulted from their investigations into the specific traits and factors that led to vocalized language. These include the influence of the gestural and vocal characteristics of our primate ancestors, the growth of brain size, tool manufacture, a migratory lifestyle, enhanced social complexity, and our supralaryngeal vocal tract. But often the theories from the various disciplines contradict. Because this study aims to provide theatre scholarship and voice pedagogy with an evolutionary theory of voice relevant for a hearing of the voice in performance, “Vocal Origins” also offers a comprehensive theory of vocal development that takes the contrasting views into consideration. The comprehensive theory, relying primarily upon the narrative of human origins offered by neurologist Merlin Donald, argues for four domains of vocal use that are analogous to four stages of our evolutionary development. These four domains are evident in the forms of vocal communication we use today: the emotive and instinctual, the mimetic, the linguistic, and the mediated.

Chapter two, “The Voice in Phenomenology and Existentialism,” examines the argument advanced in phenomenology that the sounds of the human voice join with meaning in the expression of physical reality and aid in making being and immaterial ideas present to the consciousness of others. Edmund Husserl provides phenomenology, and specifically Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with three concepts that assist in an assessment of vocalized language: the link of sound with sense, communication as embodied, and the operation of logos in speech. The existential phenomenologist Jean-Paul Sartre joins Heidegger in considering the role technology plays in relation to consciousness, and the chapter also explores the implications of their thinking for a comprehension of the voice in communication technology.