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The Grain of the Voice [Le grain de la voix]

Summary/Abstract: This essay deals with the relationship between language and the voice in contemporary theory and musical performance practice. Building on Julia Kristeva’s work, Barthes makes a distinction between the phenotext and the genotext. The first denotes the dominant scheme of performing and listening to music, while the second, postulated by Barthes, covers all those elements of both musical and broadly acoustic experiences – elements that are not subject to the laws of representation but to those of jouissance. In order to conceptualise this experience, the author introduces the notion of the ‘grain of the voice’: it allows us to describe the subjective experience of aural perception.

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