Someone has decided how much room a voice should have. Later, if the decision is unobtrusive enough, we may congratulate the voice on having needed nobody: what a relief, after all that machinery, to hear a person. The compliment has a small difficulty concealed in its warmth. A producer who has worked to preserve a possibility has been thanked by being removed from the explanation, while the singer, whose judgement presumably includes the judgement to work with this producer, receives a certificate of independence from a relationship she chose to enter. Everybody has done something; our account of authenticity requires them to stop having done it.
In the joint interview with Rolling Stone Italia, Iosonouncane, the musician Jacopo Incani, speaks of compression, saturation and effects for his own voice, and of giving Daniela Pes's voice room for movement and dynamics. He produced Spira, her 2023 debut; they share the arrangements. These are two accounts of working with voices, with different decisions about what they need. Converting them into degrees of sincerity would be an additional operation, performed by us. Neither account tells us what every listener will hear.
Allowing room: the verb is almost too well behaved to attract suspicion. Hold a door open for somebody and, if all goes smoothly, the passage can claim the attention while the hand holding it gets none; now imagine deciding that the open door must have opened itself, because we have no recollection of being obstructed. The discretion of an intervention makes its contribution harder to recognise. It does not make that contribution smaller by definition. What we call natural may sometimes be work we have failed to notice, and our failure, promoted to a property of the sound, begins issuing instructions to the people who made it. Please do whatever is needed to let us believe nothing was needed.
The guitar is still waiting for its turn. Carme, another track on Spira, began, Pes tells OndaRock, with a guitar arpeggio subsequently passed through a Juno synthesiser: enough of a route for an earlier stage to claim the authority of an original, should we let it, though not enough to reconstruct the operation or speak on behalf of a sound we have not heard. Return the material to the guitar and we will have restored it to itself, supposedly. We will have returned to an earlier stage. To make that stage the rightful owner of everything which followed, to let chronology sit in judgement on composition, requires a reason which the word first has not supplied. Something began there; someone continued working on it.
We may dislike the continuation.
There is no need to become a synthesiser enthusiast before being allowed this objection, or to take every intrusive effect as an opportunity to correct our backward taste. A treatment can erase a difference worth keeping; it can make unlike possibilities interchangeable, or lean so insistently on an emotion that the song seems to be reaching across to arrange our response for us. That irritation may have found something. Give it a particular object and it becomes available for argument: which distinction has been lost, what could have moved and now merely complies, what the intervention has prevented or made possible. Keep it at the level of too much processing and the quantity will have done our arguing before we have said what it measures. Recognising that we cannot dispense with mediation has not relieved any particular intervention of the need to succeed.
What the guitar cannot decide for the voice, it can at least keep us from deciding too quickly. A musical figure changing destination and a person being heard are different problems; the origin of an arpeggio cannot settle the question of bodily singularity. It can, however, expose the peculiar authority we give an earlier state when we want it to overrule later work. With a singer, that work does not conveniently begin at the microphone. Take the demand for an untouched voice seriously enough and we will have to consider the breath somebody trained, the pronunciation practised until it stopped feeling practised, the possibility first attempted in imitation and made one's own through repetitions which never quite repeated their model. A voice can learn its way into being personal. Undo the learning and we have not necessarily recovered the person; we may have deprived them of something they can do.
Here the purist may want to stop: of course the singer's own accomplishments can remain; it is the other people's additions we meant. But some of those accomplishments are what has become of other people's additions. Once received, tried, altered, absorbed, they have become capacities; the boundary between the person and the assistance cannot be drawn merely by inspecting which side of the studio door somebody stood on. This leaves plenty of room to object to a particular choice. It leaves less room for congratulating ourselves on having dispensed with the need to choose.
And some contributions remain somebody else's, quite properly.
The credits to Spira identify samples in Ca Mira: Sandro Fresi playing hurdy-gurdy, Federico Pazzona supplying vocals. The record does not become less Pes's because it contains those contributions, nor does its artistic unity require the other names to become aliases for hers. To follow a work as a whole is not to hear all its materials as originating in one body. A name can establish the provenance of a sample without teaching us to isolate it by ear; knowing who contributed and being able to pull a contribution out of the sound are different abilities. The credits give us something definite to ask about before the attractive word personal has quietly made everybody else disappear.
It would be pleasant if such care with names made the record succeed, since conscientiousness would then supply us with a reliable taste; but accuracy about who did what cannot make their doing it artistically convincing, and conviction, when it comes, cannot travel backwards to repair an attribution. We still have to ask what has been made of the material. A work can disappoint us after acknowledging every contribution, or convince us while leaving a question of attribution unresolved; our pleasure has no means of answering that question, however much we feel it ought to have done something for us by now.
All of which may sound like a protracted way of keeping somebody from their own voice. We have gone in the other direction: the person who was supposed to emerge once every relation had been removed was gradually losing the means of emerging at all. There is a serious desire beneath that bad procedure. Hearing a voice, we may want to encounter someone, not merely receive a set of words which another speaker could have delivered; for Adriana Cavarero, in The Vocal Body, the voice communicates a bodily singularity which its verbal meaning does not exhaust. What the sentence says cannot include everything about this person saying it. This is a philosophical distinction, not an experimental finding about our capacity to recognise singers, and it does not certify the delivery of an intact body inside a recording. The distinction gives us a way to ask what we are seeking. The recording has its own conditions under which something can be found.
Press play again and the utterance returns, while the person who made it does not return to make it again for us. We can interrupt it, carry it elsewhere, receive it at a time its maker does not share. The terms of presence have changed. No amount of scrubbing the production will make this repeatability behave like an encounter in which two people can answer each other there and then; equally, a relationship to a recorded action need not vanish because that reciprocal situation is absent. Somebody was there when the utterance was made; somebody is here receiving its recorded form, and those two occasions do not have to be smuggled into a single present before the relationship can count.
Keep the producer outside, then, if that is what a personal voice requires. The singer will have to join him, at least insofar as she chose to work with him: we can keep her untouched only by declining to recognise that choice as hers, so that the more of her independence we protect, the less of her judgement we are able to let in. Something may indeed have been lost in the work. We have still to say what, at which decision, rather than expel the people through whom she chose to make it and wait indoors for somebody altogether more personal to arrive.
Philosophical reference
Adriana Cavarero, “The Vocal Body: Extract from a Philosophical Encyclopedia of the Body,” translated by Matt Langione, Qui Parle, 21(1), 2012, pp. 71–83, especially pp. 80–81. Text consulted.