詩(shī)歌中的聽(tīng)覺(jué)場(chǎng)景分析與聲音

在本篇簡(jiǎn)短的論文中，我想談一下2011年以來(lái)我詩(shī)歌中的一個(gè)中心問(wèn)題，一個(gè)既有主旨性又有技巧性的問(wèn)題：詩(shī)歌中的聲音。首先要說(shuō)明的是，我指的“聲音”并不是通常關(guān)于鮮明特征或風(fēng)格的比喻含義。相反，我說(shuō)的是聲音的物質(zhì)性是如何成為我們理解詩(shī)歌的一個(gè)因素的。當(dāng)然，有一點(diǎn)要承認(rèn)的是，在閱讀紙上的文字時(shí)，只有紙張和筆墨的無(wú)言相伴，因而任何對(duì)此類聲音的考量或討論都必須是假想的或象征性的。但我希望能避免對(duì)聲音作此類象征性處理，因?yàn)檫@通常是創(chuàng)意寫作研習(xí)班的研究對(duì)象。

我將從另一位學(xué)者的聲音開(kāi)始說(shuō)起，即比爾·梅德門特（Bill Maidment）的聲音，他是悉尼大學(xué)的教師，我們大約相識(shí)于1991年，直至2005年他去世，他一直是我的良師益友。2006年初的一個(gè)早晨，在悉尼大學(xué)附近的格利伯區(qū)，我經(jīng)歷了一場(chǎng)入睡前幻覺(jué)。比爾的聲音將我喚醒，還是生前老友的感覺(jué)，跟我說(shuō)著什么。對(duì)此，我大吃一驚：就好像他與我同處拂曉前的房間，而我努力地分辨他在說(shuō)什么，且事實(shí)是我認(rèn)為自己是確確實(shí)實(shí)地聽(tīng)到了，而不是想象出來(lái)的。于是，就出現(xiàn)了幾個(gè)問(wèn)題并亟待解答：這些問(wèn)題兼具哲理性、技巧性和倫理性。比爾的去世給我的創(chuàng)造力帶來(lái)了危機(jī)，一直持續(xù)了好幾年。期間對(duì)解答這些問(wèn)題的關(guān)注引我走上了三條詩(shī)歌之路，且自那時(shí)我已意識(shí)到，這三條路即使不是相互糾纏，至少也是彼此疊蓋。

首先是押韻的問(wèn)題。在我迄今為止的詩(shī)歌實(shí)踐中，對(duì)聲音的考量一直都是頗具創(chuàng)意的推動(dòng)因素，且之前我就已將押韻視為諸多詩(shī)歌創(chuàng)作手法中的一項(xiàng)，其他還有準(zhǔn)押韻、頭韻和對(duì)偶句的交錯(cuò)配列等，說(shuō)到底，這些都是聽(tīng)覺(jué)重復(fù)原則上的各種變體。蘇珊·斯圖爾特（Susan Stewart）在她的文章《詩(shī)歌之聲/聲之詩(shī)歌》（The Sound, of Poetry/ The Poetry of Sound）（馬喬里·佩洛夫（MarjoriePerloff）和克雷格·德沃金（Craig Dworkin）編輯，2009年）中，對(duì)押韻提出了類似的主張。2005年之前，我就創(chuàng)作了一些押韻詩(shī)，但強(qiáng)烈地感受到了幾位澳大利亞當(dāng)代詩(shī)人對(duì)押韻出于本能的蔑視，并將其視為（詩(shī)歌領(lǐng)域）政治保守主義的標(biāo)志，為此我搜尋了更為創(chuàng)新的方法以探討押韻問(wèn)題。我首先研究了約瑟夫·布羅茨基（Joseph Brodsky）詩(shī)歌英譯版本中的半押韻，隨后很快轉(zhuǎn)而探索保羅·馬爾登（Paul Muldoon）在押韻上的創(chuàng)新，主要關(guān)注他們?cè)谠?shī)節(jié)中的傾向性和非對(duì)稱結(jié)構(gòu)以及押韻詩(shī)行的長(zhǎng)度差異，這些追根溯源都得自路易斯·麥克尼斯（Louis MacNeice）。

幾次試驗(yàn)后，我得出了自認(rèn)為原創(chuàng)性的解決方案。雖然我聲稱原創(chuàng)性，但我只是稍稍延遲地響應(yīng)了他人的成果：由于在北京無(wú)法登錄我的圖書館，我只能拿美國(guó)詩(shī)人莉茲·瓦爾德納（Liz Waldner）作例子，因?yàn)樗姆椒ê臀覈L試的方法一樣有條理。我的想法是對(duì)押韻詩(shī)行的詞尾音素進(jìn)行重組，作為一種限定。實(shí)際上這要涉及到四個(gè)音節(jié)和偶爾的音素倒置。其結(jié)果就是梅健青（Kim Cheng Boey）所說(shuō)的“流暢且鏗鏘有力的音調(diào)（mellifluous sonorousness）”，但這僅僅是系統(tǒng)性打亂音素群的一個(gè)副產(chǎn)物：它看起來(lái)、聽(tīng)起來(lái)都很美，但之前卻是以斷裂的概念開(kāi)始的，即通過(guò)這種方式將語(yǔ)言拆分開(kāi)，我實(shí)際上是在辨別所謂聲音的組成要素，我們應(yīng)稱之為音素（phoneme），但我更傾向于稱之為鼓膜素（tympaneme），容后詳述。下面拿我的詩(shī)《海岸線》（Coastline）做個(gè)例子，大家或許能發(fā)現(xiàn)它并沒(méi)有完全達(dá)到其靈感上的嚴(yán)苛，因?yàn)樗鼘㈥?yáng)韻和陰韻與音素重組混合在一起（恐怕其結(jié)果是完全無(wú)法翻譯出來(lái)的）：

I walked the cliff-top walk, totally alone

at the other end of love, on the way from one littoral

to another, balancing an act

in a world out of balance, piecing together words

to confront something, long ago put to the sword.

我行走于峭壁之巔，踽踽一人

在愛(ài)的彼端，從一個(gè)海岸

到另一海岸， 努力平衡著

在這失衡之世界，拼湊零言碎語(yǔ)

直面那，早已被劍斬殺之物。

Level with my eyes a seagull hovered, motionless

into the wind. I passed beer cans in modern middens,

dandelions on the path’s port side

while slowly from the north-east, thunderheads of mackerel-

mottled clouds began to coolly spit on the caramel-

視線同高處有海鷗翱翔，似靜止般

隱入風(fēng)中。途經(jīng)垃圾箱中的啤酒罐，

道路左舷有蒲公英

東北側(cè)緩緩來(lái)，云砧似鯖魚

斑駁陸離 悠然輕吐向焦糖顏色的峭壁。

coloured cliffs. It’s funny how it worms

its way in, love, diasporated like a swarm

of angry bees bearding a heart.

The continents are the oldest divorcees, having drifted

apart for eons. Next to them we’ve barely tiffed.

多有趣 緩慢蠕動(dòng)

似此番，愛(ài)，遷居如一群

掛在心上的憤怒的蜜蜂。

大陸乃是最老的離婚者，永遠(yuǎn)飄移分離。

相形之下 我輩拌嘴不足記。

比爾去世后，我追尋的第二條詩(shī)歌之路是對(duì)“聲音”相當(dāng)全面的考量：它是什么，意味著什么，有哪些不同的維度，如認(rèn)識(shí)論的、現(xiàn)象學(xué)的、詩(shī)歌的、政治方面的、精神上的維度等。鑒于聲音在表達(dá)上的中心地位——是最根本的必要性——，那么對(duì)哲學(xué)、心理分析甚至是語(yǔ)言學(xué)中聲音的研究如此之少就很令人驚訝了。仿佛產(chǎn)生并維持人們的言語(yǔ)互動(dòng)的工具不值得（或者是可能經(jīng)不起）類似索緒爾對(duì)語(yǔ)言系統(tǒng)所做的持久分析。在嘗試將聲音恢復(fù)為詩(shī)歌本身的一項(xiàng)主體時(shí)，我的關(guān)注點(diǎn)又一次回到嘗試從其基礎(chǔ)層面來(lái)理解它，或者說(shuō)剖析它。通過(guò)這種做法，我持續(xù)地返回到一個(gè)觀點(diǎn)：聲音，即音響的連續(xù)統(tǒng)一體，被細(xì)分為其組成要素，或者說(shuō)音素。此處，我想到了拉康（Lacan）的觀點(diǎn)，“指示結(jié)構(gòu)的要素最終指的是音素，它使語(yǔ)言結(jié)構(gòu)得以具體化。”音素是能指的主體，但它本身沒(méi)意義：在指示動(dòng)作中，意表主體或分裂的自我消失不見(jiàn)。對(duì)音素此方面的考量部分組成了《聲音解剖學(xué)》的第二次分割，其中第二至第十首詩(shī)是由第一首詩(shī)中摘出的第一詩(shī)行組成，且在接下來(lái)的五個(gè)詩(shī)行中（或多或少地）在音素方面進(jìn)行了重組。從主題性和互文性看，我還堅(jiān)持這樣一個(gè)觀念：由其他聲音組成聲音，“里面有其他的東西掩蓋著黑暗”，這是巴赫金雜語(yǔ)理論的一個(gè)版本。

現(xiàn)在我想要走出詩(shī)歌的技巧性考量，討論下與我的聲音調(diào)查有關(guān)的更為廣泛的問(wèn)題。第一個(gè)涉及從心理分析角度看聲音是什么。嬰兒首先會(huì)做的事情之一就是哭。從拉康主義的角度看，這顯然是對(duì)其他人的識(shí)別和訴求。這對(duì)詩(shī)歌中任何聲音的考量都十分重要：即它涉及了對(duì)他人的識(shí)別和訴求。第二點(diǎn)涉及聲音如何呼吁他者：即通過(guò)聽(tīng)的方式。人們可以爭(zhēng)論說(shuō)，現(xiàn)代詩(shī)歌最為重要的發(fā)展在侏羅紀(jì)早期，大約在1.95億年前，當(dāng)時(shí)出現(xiàn)了吳氏巨顱獸，一種小型哺乳類動(dòng)物，現(xiàn)已滅絕，約長(zhǎng)3.2厘米，長(zhǎng)著幾乎完整的哺乳類動(dòng)物的耳朵。人們無(wú)法想象，如果沒(méi)有聽(tīng)力功能，哺乳動(dòng)物（更不用說(shuō)人類）會(huì)如何演變。但肯定的是，如果沒(méi)有這個(gè)功能，詩(shī)歌就不會(huì)存在。無(wú)論是否有音樂(lè)伴奏，詩(shī)歌起初是用來(lái)吟唱的，這樣一個(gè)假設(shè)受到了德里達(dá)（Derrida）的挑戰(zhàn)。他的論據(jù)是書寫先于言語(yǔ)存在類似于聲音先于聽(tīng)覺(jué)這一假定。耳朵的發(fā)育是為了響應(yīng)聲音嗎？還是說(shuō)聲音是在耳朵的存在下才產(chǎn)生的？又或者是，按照法國(guó)評(píng)論家羅杰·凱洛伊斯（Roger Caillois）的說(shuō)法，我們不把聲音視為具有通過(guò)自然選擇賦予的功能，而是將其視為出現(xiàn)在世界上的一種模式，或是模式的一部分？

當(dāng)我們認(rèn)為進(jìn)化論可能無(wú)法解釋時(shí)，聲音的第三個(gè)方面就出現(xiàn)了，并且我們需要神話來(lái)介入。在希臘神話中，聽(tīng)力、聽(tīng)覺(jué)和死亡有著密切的聯(lián)系。聽(tīng)到賽壬（古希臘傳說(shuō)中半人半鳥的女海妖）的歌就等于走向死亡。賽壬遠(yuǎn)房姐妹斯芬克斯的謎語(yǔ)，聽(tīng)了但破解不了就要死去。當(dāng)克勞狄斯將毒藥倒入老哈姆雷特的耳朵里時(shí)，死亡就隨著聽(tīng)覺(jué)一起來(lái)臨。聽(tīng)覺(jué)只不過(guò)是內(nèi)耳基底膜上的銘文，它是通過(guò)聽(tīng)小骨的機(jī)械運(yùn)作產(chǎn)生的，這點(diǎn)又是由鼓膜的振動(dòng)引起的：它是一種書寫形式，其基本單位或可被稱為“鼓膜素（tympaneme）”。正如德里達(dá)指出的，早在很久以前，書寫就和死亡、腐朽放在一起理解，但是還有另一種方法來(lái)看待這種銘文式聽(tīng)覺(jué)和死亡之間的聯(lián)系，那就是信息論。信息復(fù)制的熱力學(xué)原理決定了精度和能量間必然有此消彼長(zhǎng)的平衡。生物學(xué)層面信息復(fù)制的不精確一定會(huì)帶來(lái)衰老和死亡，不幸運(yùn)的話甚至可能會(huì)導(dǎo)致癌癥，。從這個(gè)角度出發(fā)，在神話中，耳內(nèi)信息復(fù)制的不精確應(yīng)和死亡緊密聯(lián)系在一起，這看起來(lái)就是十分恰當(dāng)?shù)念惐攘恕?/p>

說(shuō)到這點(diǎn)，我必須承認(rèn)自己對(duì)信息論的認(rèn)識(shí)受到對(duì)其數(shù)學(xué)運(yùn)算的詳細(xì)了解的限制（我懷疑我們中的大多數(shù)人都這樣）。或許正是因?yàn)檫@個(gè)原因，信息論在文學(xué)研究領(lǐng)域的應(yīng)用十分貧瘠，可為人盡皆知。同樣，用信息論分析文學(xué)文本的“信息”，往往是基于對(duì)文本的精確理解，包括單詞或字母所被賦予的二進(jìn)制值。這點(diǎn)從計(jì)算型文學(xué)研究，正如我的同事，紐卡斯?fàn)柎髮W(xué)的休·克雷格（Hugh Craig）所實(shí)踐的那樣，延伸到尼爾·魯本金（Neil Rubenking）的“Brekdown”項(xiàng)目中n-1馬爾可夫陣列的使用。自20世紀(jì)80年代后期，澳大利亞詩(shī)人約翰·特蘭特（John Tranter）好幾次把該項(xiàng)目用在自己的作品中。在特蘭特的例子中，表面上他力圖創(chuàng)造“一個(gè)無(wú)作者的文學(xué)文本……一個(gè)沒(méi)有作者意圖，沒(méi)有隱藏的文化、社會(huì)、經(jīng)濟(jì)和政治價(jià)值觀，且沒(méi)有隱藏的個(gè)性議題，而是只產(chǎn)出純粹的‘文學(xué)’。盡管特蘭特是在說(shuō)反話，但我不確定這種純粹究竟是否可行，因?yàn)轸敱窘鸬捻?xiàng)目和克雷格的研究也是無(wú)聲的。但是，如果此類信息論技巧分析的信息單位是鼓膜素，結(jié)果會(huì)不一樣嗎？在某種意義上來(lái)說(shuō)不會(huì)，概率分析將得以運(yùn)用；但是從另外一種意義上看答案幾乎是肯定的，因?yàn)椴痪_首先會(huì)成為一個(gè)更大的因素，聲音本身的冗余和在其編碼過(guò)程中捕捉到的周遭雜音也是如此。這就是我在試驗(yàn)Microsoft Word 2005曾經(jīng)自帶的語(yǔ)音識(shí)別軟件時(shí)做過(guò)的事，它是我對(duì)研究聲音的詩(shī)歌性反應(yīng)中第三也是最不重要的一部分。關(guān)于這些實(shí)驗(yàn)，還有很多可以說(shuō)的，但此處時(shí)間和篇幅有限。我就只列舉自己閱讀中的兩個(gè)例子。鑒于特蘭特已經(jīng)使用“Brekdown”項(xiàng)目給每首詩(shī)取了個(gè)標(biāo)題，且這些標(biāo)題是那些聽(tīng)錯(cuò)的詩(shī)的變位詞（anagram）。或許，正如雅克·阿塔利（Jacques Attali）所言，音樂(lè)的變化是文化變化的先兆，我們可能提及最多的是，20世紀(jì)90年代的低保真流行樂(lè)和搖滾樂(lè)唱片運(yùn)動(dòng)預(yù)示了這些試驗(yàn)的發(fā)生。

最后，我想根據(jù)前述內(nèi)容再做些推斷，并給出建議使研究更進(jìn)一步。我們的聽(tīng)覺(jué)并不完美：完美是不可能的，因?yàn)槁?tīng)覺(jué)在轉(zhuǎn)錄過(guò)程中信息的能量會(huì)有所丟失。同樣遺忘也需要能量，因此也不完整。然而，我們的文學(xué)制度在學(xué)術(shù)精度上有其基礎(chǔ)，在西方，這種基礎(chǔ)是建立在科學(xué)方法之上的。我們急于保存文本和某些含義，但是說(shuō)到不確定性的對(duì)數(shù)測(cè)量（即一則消息所含的信息量）與含義的相對(duì)確定性（它或多或少指的是消除不確定性）之間的關(guān)系，我們可能會(huì)覺(jué)得別扭。思考這種關(guān)系的另一個(gè)方法，正如喬納森·斯威夫特一首詩(shī)中所述“秩序出自混亂中/艷麗鮮花糞里來(lái)（order from confusion sprung/ such gaudy tulips raised from dung）”。此處說(shuō)的是，正是由于我們?nèi)菀渍`聽(tīng)、誤解且選擇性地接收信息的傾向，才使我們找到一些重要的可能途徑來(lái)取得進(jìn)展：請(qǐng)容許我強(qiáng)調(diào)，此處我并不是在說(shuō)“虛假新聞”，或是對(duì)氣候科學(xué)的頑固無(wú)知；而是把評(píng)論限制在詩(shī)歌領(lǐng)域。與我們對(duì)古典信息論的期待相反，比起在全是寂靜的孤立狀態(tài)下聽(tīng)取打斷的言語(yǔ)，人類大腦在擁擠或吵鬧的環(huán)境中，更容易正確聽(tīng)取并理解受阻信息。這就是阿爾伯特·S·布雷格曼（Albert S. Bregman）所說(shuō)的“聽(tīng)覺(jué)場(chǎng)景分析”，我認(rèn)為它對(duì)我們思考詩(shī)歌中的“聲音”有些啟示。如果雜音、誤聽(tīng)等表面混亂不僅自然，還有助于產(chǎn)生新的含義，又會(huì)如何呢？如果不是單單在系統(tǒng)和連貫中找出抽象的難點(diǎn)和分離，如果這些的來(lái)源也是聲音本身、音色、聲調(diào)、重音和響亮度，還有氛圍、共鳴和或許更為重要的多重性，又會(huì)如何？說(shuō)話聲音中的冗余標(biāo)志著對(duì)可理解含義的充實(shí)的理解，正如它們?cè)诮芰_姆·羅滕伯格（Jerome Rothenberg）的翻譯中可能做到的那樣，但是它們也可能標(biāo)志著對(duì)不同形式的押韻及它的近親韻律重新燃起了興趣。這樣做將成為回歸主體和分裂的自我的另一種方法，或許是通過(guò)這樣一種方法，它會(huì)展開(kāi)聽(tīng)覺(jué)場(chǎng)景中的指示意圖，并帶來(lái)通過(guò)詩(shī)歌的探索。

Auditory Scene Analysis and Voice in Poetry

David Musgrave

In this necessarily brief paper I want to talk about one of the central preoccupations in my poetry since 2011, which is both thematic and technical: the question of ‘voice’ in poetry. From the outset I want to be clear that I do not mean ‘voice’ in its customarily metaphorical sense of signature or style. Instead, I mean how the materiality of voice can be part of our understanding of poetry. Of course, I acknowledge that, in reading words on a page, any consideration or discussion of such voice must be imaginary or figurative, as there is only the silence of paper and ink to accompany it; but I hope to avoid the kind of figurative treatment of the subject which is often the subject of creative writing workshops.

I want to start with the voice of another, in this case that of Bill Maidment, academic at the University of Sydney and my friend and mentor from around 1991 until his death in 2005. One morning (in Glebe) in early 2006 I experienced a hypnagogic hallucination. It was Bill’s voice waking me, saying something to me in keeping with the nature of our friendship. I was startled: it was as if he was in the pre-dawn room with me, and I struggled to process what it was he said and the fact that I thought that I had actually heard and not imagined it. Several questions arose which demanded answers: these were philosophical, technical and ethical questions. In the following years of a creative crisis engendered by Bill’s death, my concern with answering these questions led me down three poetic paths which I have since realised were, if not implicated then at least imbricated with each other.

The first of these was a question of rhyme. In my poetic practice hitherto, considerations of sound had always been a driving, creative force, and I had always considered rhyme as one of a number of poetic devices, along with assonance, alliteration, chiasmus and so on, which are ultimately variations on the principle of aural repetition. Susan Stewart claims as much for rhyme in her essay in The Sound, of Poetry/ The Poetry of Sound (ed.Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, 2009) and prior to 2005 I had written several rhyming poems, but acutely aware of the almost visceral disdain for rhyme on the part of several contemporary Australian poets, as well as it being a marker for a (poetically) reactionary political conservatism, I searched for ways to explore rhyme in more innovative ways. My encounter with the half rhymes of the English translations of Joseph Brodsky’s poems was quickly superseded by the discovery of Paul Muldoon’s innovations with rhyme, in terms of their slantness and their asymmetrical arrangement across a stanza and the differing lengths of rhyming lines, which ultimately derive from Louis MacNeice.

After several experiments I arrived at what I felt was an original solution, although as with all claims to originality, I had merely belatedly echoed the achievements of others: without access to my library here in Beijing, I can only offer the example of the American poet Liz Waldner as someone whose approach is as systematic as I have tried to be. My idea was to adopt, as a constraint, the rearrangement of the terminal phonemes of rhyming lines, which in practice involved up to four syllables and which also involved the occasional inversion of phonemes. The result was what Kim Cheng Boey called a “mellifluous sonorousness”, but this was merely a by-product of a systematic derangement of the sense of a few phonemes grouped together: it looked and sounded nice, but had begun with what was a notion of fracture: that by taking apart the language in this fashion, I was in effect identifying what might be a constituent element of the voice, which we should call the phoneme, but which I would prefer to call the tympaneme – more of that later. Here is an example from my poem ‘Coastline’ which, as you may be able to see, does not completely live up to the rigour of its inspiration, as it mixes masculine and feminine rhymes with phonemic rearrangement (the effects I refer to are, I fear, completely untranslatable):

I walked the cliff-top walk, totally alone

at the other end of love, on the way from one littoral

to another, balancing an act

in a world out of balance, piecing together words

to confront something, long ago put to the sword.

Level with my eyes a seagull hovered, motionless 

into the wind. I passed beer cans in modern middens,

dandelions on the path’s port side 

while slowly from the north-east, thunderheads of mackerel-

mottled clouds began to coolly spit on the caramel-

coloured cliffs. It’s funny how it worms

its way in, love, diasporated like a swarm

of angry bees bearding a heart.

The continents are the oldest divorcees, having drifted

apart for eons. Next to them we’ve barely tiffed.

The second poetic path I went down after Bill’s death was a fairly extensive consideration of ‘voice’: what is it, what does it mean, what are its different dimensions: epistemological, phenomenological, poetic, political, psychic and so on. Given the centrality – indeed, fundamental necessity – of the voice to utterance, it is surprising how little has been devoted to the voice in philosophy, psychoanalysis and even linguistics. It is as if the vehicle which enables and sustains our verbal interactions is not worthy of (or perhaps not amenable to) the kind of sustained analysis that a de Saussure, for example, was able to undertake with regard to the system of language. In attempting to recuperate the voice as a subject for poetry itself, I again found myself concerned with trying to understand it in its fundamental aspects, anatomizing it if you like. In so doing, I kept coming back to the idea of a voice, which is a continuum of sound, being reduced to its constituent elements, or phonemes. Here I was reminded of Lacan’s suggestion that ‘the element that [the] signifying structure ultimately refers to is the phoneme, which materialises the structure of language.’ The phoneme is the subject of the signifier, but the phoneme itself lacks sense: the signifying body or divided self disappears in the act of signification. A consideration of this aspect of the phoneme partly constitutes the second partition of Anatomy of Voice, where the 2nd to 10th verses consist of a first line taken from the first verse and rearranged phonemically (more or less) in the succeeding five lines. Thematically and intertextually, I also adhered to the notion of voice being constituted by other voices: “inside it there are others/ tenting the dark”, a version of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia if you like.

I’d like now to move beyond poetically technical considerations to some broader issues to do with my investigation of voice. The first relates to what a voice is from a psychoanalytic point of view. One of the first things a baby does is to cry. From a Lacanian perspective, this is clearly a recognition of, and an appeal to an other. This is of profound importance to any consideration of voice in poetry: that it involves a recognition of and an appeal to the other. The second point relates to how the voice appeals to the other: through hearing. One could argue that the most significant development in modern poetry took place in the early Jurassic, around 195 million years ago, with the appearance of Hadrocodium, a small mammaliaform, now extinct, approximately 3.2cm long and possessing a nearly full mammalian ear. One cannot speculate how the evolution of mammals, let alone humans, might have occurred without the faculty of hearing, but it is certain that poetry would not exist without it. The assumption that poems were first sung, accompanied or not by music, has been challenged by Derrida. His argument, that writing precedes speech, has its analogue in the supposed precedence of voice to hearing. Did the ear develop in response to the call of the voice, or did voice arise at the invitation of the ear? Or, following the French critic Roger Caillois, do we see the voice as not having a utility bestowed upon it through natural selection, but rather as a mode, or part of a mode of appearing in the world?

A third aspect of voice emerges when we consider that the theory of evolution might have failed us, and we need myth to step in. In Greek mythology there is an intimate connection between listening, hearing and death. To hear the song of the Siren is to be lured to one’s death. To listen to the riddle of the Siren’s distant cousin, the Sphinx, and not to solve it is to die. Death arrives in the manner of the poison Claudius pours in Old Hamlet’s ear, with hearing. And hearing is nothing more than the inscription on the basilar membrane of the inner ear, by way of the mechanical operation of the auditory ossicles, which are set off by vibrations of the tympanum: a form of writing of which the fundamental unit may be termed the tympaneme. Writing has long been understood in terms of death and corruption, as Derrida has noted, but there is another way of looking at this connection between Inscriptive hearing and death, and that is through Information Theory. The thermodynamics of information copying dictates that there must be a trade-off between precision and energy. The imprecision of informational replication at the biological level may lead to cancer if one is unlucky, but certainly leads to senescence and death. The imprecision of informational replication in the ear should be closely associated in myth with death seems, from this point of view, to be more than an apt analogy.

Having arrived at this point, I must confess that my understanding of Information Theory is limited, like most of us I suspect, by any detailed understanding of its mathematics. Perhaps for this reason the application of Information Theory to literary studies has been notoriously sterile. Not the least reason for this is that the ‘information’ of a literary text subjected to Information Theoretical analysis tends to be based on the mathematical understanding of a text consisting of binary values assigned to words or letters. This extends from computational literary studies, as practiced by my colleague Hugh Craig at the University of Newcastle, to the use of n-1 Markov arrays in Neil Rubenking’s program ‘Brekdown’, which has been utilised by the Australian poet John Tranter in several of his compositions since the late 1980s. In the case of Tranter, he ostensibly seeks to create ‘a(chǎn) writer-free literary text… A text free of authorial intentions and without buried cultural, social, economic and political values and hidden personality agendas, giving forth only “l(fā)iterature” in its pure state.’ I am not sure such purity is at all possible, even if Tranter means it ironically, for both Rubenking’s program and Craig’s researches are also voice-free. But if the unit of information subjected to such Information theoretical techniques was the tympaneme, would the result differ? In one sense no, probabilistic analysis would style apply; but in another sense, the answer is most assuredly yes, for the imprecision would firstly be a much greater factor, as would the redundancy of the voice itself and any ambient noise captured in its encoding. This is precisely what I have done in my experiments with the speech recognition software that was once native to Microsoft Word 2005, which is the third, and least significant strand of my poetic response to researching voice. There is much that I could say about these experiments, but do not have the time or space here. I offer two examples in my reading, and in deference to Tranter’s use of ‘Brekdown’ have given each poem a title which is an anagram of the poem which has been misheard. Perhaps, as Jacques Attali has noted, changes in music function as a harbinger of cultural changes, and the most we might say of these experiments is that they were prefigured by the lo-fi pop and rock recording movement of the 1990s.

I’d like to conclude with some more speculation, drawing on what I have already put before you, and some suggestions for ways forward. We do not hear perfectly: to do so is impossible, for there is energy in the message lost through the act of aural transcription. Similarly, forgetting requires energy, and is also therefore imperfect, yet our literary institutions have their foundations in a scholarly precision which, in the west, is founded on the scientific method. We are anxious to preserve texts and certain meanings, yet we are uncomfortable, perhaps, with the connection between the logarithmic measure of uncertainty, which is the amount of information a message contains, and the relative certainty of meaning, which is more or less the elimination of uncertainty. Another way of thinking of this connection is as ‘order from confusion sprung/ such gaudy tulips raised from dung’, where it is through our propensity to mishear, to misapprehend and to selectively listen to the messages we receive that important possible paths forward are opened to us: and let me stress that I am not talking about ‘fake news’ here, or wilful ignorance of climate science; I’m restricting my comments to poetry. Contrary to what we would expect from classic Information Theory, the human brain’s ability to correctly hear and interpret an interrupted message is easier in a crowded or noisy environment than it is when an interrupted utterance is listened to in isolation where silence fills the gaps. This is what Albert S. Bregman calls ‘a(chǎn)uditory scene analysis’ and it has, I think, implications for our thinking of the ‘voice’ in poetry. What if the apparent chaos of noise, mishearing and so on were not only natural, but conducive to the production of new meanings? And rather than exclusively finding in systems and coherences abstract aporias and disjunctions, what if a source of these was also voice itself, its timbres, intonations, stresses and sonorities, as well as its ambience, resonances and perhaps even more importantly, pluralities? The redundancies in the speaking voice signal an enriched understanding of intelligible meaning, as they perhaps do in Jerome Rothenberg’s translations, but they might also signal a revival of interest in rhyme, in all its varied forms, and its near relation, rhythm. To do so would be yet another way to return to the body and the divided self, perhaps in a way that unfolds the signifying intention in an auditory scene and which invites exploration through poetry.