Звукът и сакралното
The Sound and the Sacred

Summary/Abstract: The present article aims to provide some semiotic approaches and theoretical foundations for the constitution of a science of ritual sound medium. The sound phenomena, achieved systematically and purposefully in the ritual, are examined as a sound mask, as a travesty. Thanks to this the ritual personae abandons the natural “laic” conduct and actively achieves a specific ritual status. The ritual mask is treated as a basic primary level of ritual behaviour. The sound is not a field of application into which existing semiotic theories can easily extend their dominion. The article is a polemics against reductionistic (semiotic) models of ritual sound based on an abstract non-referential interpretation of sound medium. Here the different zones of the sound medium are studied in fact as semiotic models of specific ritual activity with specific polydimentional and “multivocal” semantic fields, and are examined in the perspective of the notional integrity of their ritual complex. These semantic fields should be studied from the point of view of the ritual personae. Here is the typological space of different zones of the ritual sound medium: 1. Sound poles (ritual silence or soundlessness vs. ritual chaotic noise); 2. Ritual speech poles or poles of logos affective vocalization (introvert speech vs. superextravert speech). The introvert speech comprises of a complex circle of sonoric and prosodic phenomena. This ritual speech is secret, hidden, esoteric, difficult to comprehend. It is usually in pianissimo (parameter of dynamics) and in prestissimo (parameter of tempo), with tendency towards sound levelling or differentiation in incantation; it also tends towards rhythmitization or towards speech effects (anaphora, glotalization, nasalization, etc.). The superextrovert zone encompasses sound phenomena strongly attacking the acoustic space such as: a loud dynamics manipulating mainly with vowels, expressive sound gestures as shouting, yelling, whooping, etc., emphatically mobile musicalization of speech, laconic texts, a grouping of vowels, disintegration of words in syllables and even in one-type sounds (vocals, hissing, etc.). These extremely specific structures of modelling the esoteric and exoteric plan of speech are shown to be constituted by the pragmatic plan of ritual semiosis. The different zones of the sound medium are the main topics in the author’s dissertation “The Sound Medium in the Rituals: an attempt of a typological analysis” (1982) and in other of her articles.

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