PRONUNCIATION

 

Prosody comes from Greek prosodia “tune”, “song sung to instrumental music” or “speech set to song.” The speech act is language setting itself to music. Care for pronunciation is also integral to the origin of prosody: pitch variation, tempo, intonation, pause, place of articulation in the vocal organs and so on. Pronunciation orders the world. A simple recitation of the alphabet can be cosmogenic. Perhaps the first science was the science of pronunciation — attunement to the radical nuances and discrete bio-influences of the phonemes. The first “limb” of the Vedas is the Shiksha-Vedanga, a phonology manual written by the sage/linguist Panini focused on classification of the letter-sounds, pitch, duration, phonotactic constraints and mudra. In the manual Panini recommends: "As the tigress carries her cubs between her teeth taking care lest they should either be dropped or bitten (elided or mispronounced) so should one pronounce the speech-sounds.” Pronouncing an off-key syllable is "like striking someone with lightning." This session is, in effect, a phonic abecedarian, delving into the properties and potencies of each phoneme and its influence on the body. A typical sampling of sources: Sanskrit, Tiwa, articulatory phonetics, Rudolph Steiner, mantra, tantra, Velimir Khlebnikov, icaros, nada yoga, the Endangered Language Alliance, Silvia Nakkach, Kukai...

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POETRY PROSODY

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Prosody is a little-known field. And, typically, little of the prosodic field is actually plied. This session will first elaborate on the art of prosody as conventionally practiced by poets* and then probe prosody’s basic elements of composition in depth. To extend prosody and evoke further compositional possibilities, we’ll move beyond the basic elements by calling upon overlooked aspects of prosody, terms fallen into disuse, prospective terms, terms never-before conjured or carried over from other areas. Generally, I'll contradict the considerable consensus that is quick to disparage prosody, most often by reducing it to metronomic metrics. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics sums up its own sullen explication of prosody by stating “Over the past century, there has been a general perception that prosody is a desiccated subject, a stony little patch of ground frequented only by eccentrics, fanatics, and pedants.” Meanwhile, the plethora of current prosodic innovations is breathtaking. Douglas Kearney’s “grunt syntax” (from Mess And Mess And), the dialogic phrases with which Alice Notley subverts the male convention of “epic” (The Descent of Alette), or Kamau Brathwaite’s tidalectic “nation language” — each, in itself, fully attests to the vitality of prosody and the urgency for poets to fully face the music, pulse and periodicity of interconnection.

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* The art of prosody as practiced by poets is typically concerned with sound-patterning and page-dependent spatial design, drawing on basic elements of composition such as pitch, stress, alliteration, loudness, syllable count, cadence, phrasing, rhyme, lineation, enjambment, duration of juncture, speech rhythm, syntactic-repetition, strophe, page-specific word placement and handwriting, ostensibly in order to heighten the meaning or opacity of language. Note that non-acoustic, retinal, transcriptive, typographic devices such as font-choice, scare quotes, boldface, striking-through, overprinting, and word-spacing can also be read prosodically, as an extra-lexical score or performance notation. Facial expression and gesture are also parts of the total performance of live prosody. The poem’s stored performance on the page or screen might be its only presence, written non-aurally for no ulterior stage, as pure-page or solely-monitored prosody untransduced from prior or commensurate vocalization, awaiting the metabolic speed of diffusion on paper or speed of light electronic transmission.

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STARTING BEFORE THE BEGINNING: COSMOGONIC ECOLOGY

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Where does prosody begin? Positioned as the prototype of hominid communication?  If the world comes from sound, would not a recitation of the phonemes as primordial acoustic events emanate the universe all over again (as in tantric practice)? Or, could prosody possibly have played a causal role before the beginning? There must have been prior conditions that made the beginning begin. Possibly we're situated in a successive-universes scenario, or simultaneity-of-cosmoi impinging on each other.  Would it be possible for a primordial prosody, as the patterned vibration of all forms, to be even more initial than its constituting of the physical? If not, we're stuck with thinking of nothingness as the only possible prior condition. Are poets somehow especially knowledgeable with regard to origination and the maintaining of the integrity of cosmos-inclusive Nature? This session is an extensive meditative study of Anaximander's "apeiron" (defined as the indefinite or limitless.) It's poised between existence and non-existence, between time that began and that which exists without ever having had a beginning, between emptiness and stuff. How far must poetic ecology extend? Beyond earth-centric protolanguage to protocosmogenic patterning (as witnessed in the Vedas and Brahmanas)? Is there a sacrifice that would keep us well that poets are no longer performing? Such a seemingly ponderous inquiry could be answered in the affirmative simply by chanting three sounds in one as a-u-m, but further elaboration is needed. "Then even nothing was not, nor existence…the poets who’ve illumined their hearts see that which is, is kin to that which is not.” Nasadiya Sukta. A sampling of sources and terms: Anaximander, Parmenides, Sefer Yetzirah, Wang Bi, śūnyatā, Dogon Ogo, Diné hózhóón, Augustine of Hippo, Cosmic Background Radiation, Higgs field, Charles Olson, logos, henosis, "truth", and a host of Indo-Iranian terms and texts including the Avestan Gathas, Nada Bindu Upanishad, aṣ̌a/ṛtá, ta'wîl, Al-Ghazālī, Ibn Sīnā.

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LEGENDARY LINGUISTICS : WONDER OF WORDS

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What are words, anyway? The more we understand, the more inscrutable. When Kukai said that "true words are those that are aware that all words are real" what was he thinking? This session will adopt a both-and-neither approach to the unresolvable nativist/empiricist debate with regard to language acquisition. Nativists hypothesize that language is a biological adaptation, an instinct; we're hardwired or specifically equipped with a Universal Grammar that explains how the finite environmental input received by a relatively limited cognitive ability results in infinite combinatorial expressivity. For empiricists, speech is an entirely learned skill, like riding a bike, requiring no language-dedicated cognitive disposition, only trial and error. From the nativist perspective, language development exceeds both cognitive capacity and conditioning. I would like to explore, actually explode, this innatist view, as well as the whole nature/nurture debate, by pointing out a number of ways in which language exceeds all biological, developmental, behavioral determinism. There is another nature behind the naturalism of nativist adaptation. I'll call it "universal prosody" (a far more situated and entangled term than 'grammar' alone.) Even grammar is scaffolded by prosody. And perhaps behind universal prosody is yet another nature: that of mind itself. And a full inquiry into logos is obliged to speak of this. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned any existing or future debates on the origin of language as purely speculative. What, exactly, were they banning, and what has changed since? In what ways is the ban still in force? As a basis, this session will next consider many language-origination beliefs from traditional cultures, and the relationship between these beliefs and poetry and performance. And as a way to further focus on prosody, I'll specifically address language as neither instinctual nor learned but gifted. There is a Sanskrit term "apauruṣeyā" which means "unauthored." Inspiration, invocation, revelation, prophesy, oracle are common components of poetry; part of the rich prosodic transmission through the ages, in all languages. As raw data themselves, poets, seers, sages have attended this portal of originary words and word-use. We'll discuss cultural contexts and practices conducive to gifted speech (and generate our own.) What is it that experiences revelation; does prophecy have a structure or substrate? The fact that language is beyond us is immanent not only in inspiration but everyday speech, in our boundless gratitude for words as we speak. Language is an ineffable gift, given in words. A sampling of texts, terms and sources: Tibetan terma, Kukai, Vāk, Cratylus, Cangjie, Language Acquisition Device (LAD), confusion of tongues (confusio linguarum), muse, mirror neurons, angelology,  Arabic Mystical Alphabet, Maheshvara Sutra, phonemic emanation, eurhythmy, Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia, Tiwa, mara’akáme, muse, Eshu, Hávamál, Hylaea, universal grammar, K'iche', Maida, Sumer, Wurruri, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, glossolalia, zaum...

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PROSODY AS EVOLUTIONARY PRECURSOR: ADAPTIVE ADVANTAGE OF VOICE MODULATION 

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Steven Brown, Director of the NeuroArts Lab at McMaster University, posits prosody as the joint precursor of language and music with lexicality as the subsequent filling out of an emotional and intentional prosodic scaffold; after language and music evolutionarily went their separate ways, they perennially recouple in song, supporting a joint origin hypothesis as well as explaining the immense power of worded singing. W. Tecumseh Fitch introduced the term “prosodic protolanguage” to suggest how language (not only speech) is a prosodic exaltation. Prosody is not an add-on, but constitutive of speech. Piera Filippi hypothesizes that prosodic modulation of the voice for emotional communication  and interactional coordination (EIP, Emotonal Interactive Prosody) evolved into the capacity to modulate prosody for language processing and perhaps music-making (i.e., prosody, as adaptive prerequisite, is the musical origins of language.) The conjoint evolution of prosody and gesture is well-attested. In deciphering socially relevant information, prosody has proven to be more prominent than gesture, facial expression, verbal content and pragmatic context; prosody is a multimodality that encompasses and integrates gesture, content, affect, interaction and context. Childrens' first language milestones are prosodic, not linguistic. Pre-lexical prosodic features (pitch, tempo, amplitude, pause) allow children to identify word, phrase and syntactic boundaries in the speech-stream, a process known as prosodic bootstrapping. The magnified prosodics of motherese (or Infant Directed Speech) is an evolutionary window. Dean Falk contends that motherese is the only available model for elucidating how human universally acquire speech. As prosody was phylogenic, so it is ontogenic and directly revelatory.  Prosody is a sort of onomatopoeia of emotion, intent and enactive state of a speaker. As such it is dramaturgic. This session will also look closely into ideophones (Gbaya loboto-loboto "large animals plodding through mud" reduplicates not only phonic, but kinesthetic/pantomimic, and visual information as well), iconicity, phonosemantics, kinesics, music as precursory, sociolinguistics, the viscerality of phonemes as meaningful gestures in themselves...

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SCIENCE PROSODY

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Although prosody is a little-known field, it is nonetheless as commonplace as conversation, and we’d be mutually incomprehensible without it. It’s even less well-known as a multimodal, integrative practice that encompasses not only the affective musicality of speech and poetry but bioregulation, evolutionary linguistics, even cosmogony. To fill out the interdisciplinary field of prosody, this session will bring in many areas of the theory and science of prosody, including phonology, biolinguistics, kinesics, sociolinguistics, phonosemantics, psychoacoustics, 4E cognitive science, evolutionary linguistics, articulatory phonetics. There will also be readings from prosodically-relevant literary theory, ranging from the Natya Shastra to Russian Formalism to Saussurian structuralism to New Feminist Literary Criticism — to provide a more extensive, culturally-sensitized perspective on the medium of language and to open compositional possibilities through art/science reciprocity. In its expanded version, this session will also be capable of conducting rudimentary experiential research, involving qualitative and quantitative testing of the effects of tone, beat, frequency, timbre, color, gesture and other prosodic phenomena on bioprocesses such as muscle tension, blood pressure, melatonin production, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, pulse, immunoglobulin, serotonin, limbic kindling, magnetic fields and other meaningful biomarkers. Through these self-organized case studies and citizen science, art prosodists can greatly benefit from the rigors of evidenced-based empirical investigation, while science prosodists can benefit from the imaginative embodiment imperative of the arts.

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VIBE

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This session will turn to the physics of sound and the principle of energy as vibration, in order to more fully grasp the primary medium of prosody and to more adeptly relate to other disciplines and “conduct” their data. This session will open with the Sonosphere of Pauline Oliveros and R. Bruce Lindsay’s Wheel of Acoustics and move through waveform, auditory science, acoustic ecology, transduction and telecommunications to reciprocally compose ourselves more acutely in a lived mechanical and electromagnet spatiality — the phonon/photon interplay of delight. There will also be an emphasis on the artistic use of the energetic environment, drawing on both nature-signals (radio waves, brainwaves, auroras, earth currents, cell-oscillations, solar flares, etc.) and synthesized sound. We’ll consider prosody from the perspective of a “sonic plenitude.” And from the abundance of the technologized world of sound poetry and concrete music, we’ll home in on select poets and composers working in particularly prosodic and implicate ways (“prosody” in this context defined as a breaking down or breaking apart of the sound signal, either phonically or electronically; attention to the energy itself), such as Henri Chopin, Joyce Hinterding, Ernst Jandl, Pamela Z, Alvin Lucier, Shelly Hirsch, Tracie Morris, Velimir Khlebnikov, Francois Dufrene, Bob Cobbing, Anthony Braxton, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Charles Amirkhanian...

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PROSODY PERFORMANCE

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“Performance” is of course integral to the work of the various artists. This session will focus exclusively on performing, concentrating specifically on prosody performance, especially in light of the recent institutionalization of “performance studies” and the explosion of events frameable as “performance." One can speak of performing, for example, "motherhood" or "masculinity" or one’s citizenship, or any aspect of identity requiring recognition can be enacted as performance; even the turning of the pages of a book can be thought of as the performance of reading. The word “performance” comes from Old French parfornir “to completely provide, fully furnish or finish.” Phonemes themselves are distinct energies that move us. Prosodically speaking, a music and movement notation inheres in each text. We’ll work with voicing, acting, realism, conducting and composition arising from the mutual rhythmicity of words and movement. We’ll draw on everyone’s notes, questions and concerns as a collective script. Is there a performance inherent in words? Should poets do anything “special?” (The Natyasastra speaks of two primary kinds of performance behavior: lokadharmi and natyadharm, i.e., realistic behavior using common ways of communicating without altering the retelling of a story, and an exaggerated behavior meant to intensify and make symbolic.) The works of Cecila Vicuña and Fiona Templeton are instances of “completely provided” performance and unexpected performance forms. The visually prosodic performances of a Raoul Hausmann poster poem or a Glenn Ligon painting, or the chironomy of Butch Morris conduction, “spect-actor” orientation of Augusto Boal direction, or Jackson Mac Low instruction, also fully provide. “You want what you write to actually cause these things to come to exist.” — Bruce Boone.

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IMPLICATE PROSODY : ETHICS AND ECOLOGY

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This session will formulate a working definition of Implicate Prosody, a practice of prosody indissociable from ecology, personal ethics and a prescient sense of ethos. Basically, we’re all implicated in the composition of each moment. Prosody itself, as cued rhythmic reciprocity, as constitutive of life, is the means for infolding all things in themselves in interdependence, as distinct from the “explicative” unfolding of things as separately existing forms and egos. Implicate Prosody is meant as a minimum, requisite complexity or set of correlates for realizing a whole approach to prosody, without belying or belittling its nature. Accordingly, we’ll ask what each participant needs to make the field of prosody a whole practice, a fulfilled performance of one's life. In a world broken down into nation, race, class and climate warfare, what are the implications of writing radical or revolutionary poems that are not consequential, reparative or evolutionary? Indeed, acoustic features are semantic, just as being is meaning — all fine and well, provided the poem can continue to bring the world about by making it more equitable and peaceable. “God gives us not art that does not bear in itself the necessity of its fulfillment.” — (Paracelsus). The underlying premise of Implicate Prosody is that we’ve globally progressed from a period of stress through compounded distress to widespread trauma. Trauma, as experienced (exposed) most acutely in the refugee, the veteran of war, the abused, the dispossessed, the debt-destroyed, the terrified, the chemically sensitive and the climatically shattered, is now generalized (perfused, seemingly idiopathic; chronically unfixable; non-localizable, like nuclear-threat) and calling out to an impossible prosody that must be embodied. Ecology starts with cosmogony, the matter we are and are responsive to ... responsible for.

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PRIVATIZATION AND PROSODY

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Most implicatively, this session will develop a materialist analysis, inquiring into the ways in which poetry plays into neofeudalist privatization, self-ownership and the hyper-accentuation of identity, as co-occurring phenomena. Even if a poet, for example, subverts the “self” by eschewing lyric subjectivity, does it substantially alter the writer/reader relationship or liberate any aspect of ego? Should poetry realize what it says? Is it a political form when a writer treats grammar and referentiality as repressive, regulatory mechanisms analogous to dominant norms, or is it an act of inadvertent conformity? We might ask, for example, as the handful of financiers and academics known as the G30 privately determine global policies that negatively condition all our lives, at what point did poetry fail the public discourse? With which words could we have stopped the private hoarding of the 2008 bailout money by creditor conquistadors and directed it toward investment in the productive economy? And how might poetic language effectively address cold-blooded high-return investor-colossi now? — if not by first breaking down the components of the “self” that would presume to redress self-interest. Asset management typically generates high private rewards disproportionate to social productivity. Is this a potential analog for poetry? Could constitutional economics become a sociolet of poetry? Both concentrated wealth and poetry are apogees of individualized freedom. This session will begin with a bare-bones understanding of our current economic system, from the industrial revolution to productive Fordist/Taylorist capitalism to the centrality of financialized markets and the “life subsumption” of “bio-cognitive capitalism” (to quote Andrea Fumagalli). From this critique we’ll inquire into new organizational possibilities for poetry in relation to alternative economic approaches based on commonality, solidarity and caring, as one interdependent poetics. As a partial preview: supreme egoist Max Stirner will face the empathic neuroeconomics of Tania Singer, the caring economics of Michael Hudson, the I-me-mine-making of Yogacara’s ahamkara, and the compunction of Dada founder Hugo Ball. “I am not an ego along with other egos, but the sole ego: I am unique.” — Max Stirner. “The 1% realize how to sterilize the 99% from having a thought that would actually help them, not the 1%." — Michael Hudson.

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THE PROSODIC BODY 

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Prosodic modulation of the voice wholly discloses the physiological, emotional and motivational state of the speaker. How does this prosodic impartation work? The Prosodic Body is an elucidation of prosody's influence on and manifestation as physiology. (Our bodies formed around the formative frequencies known as phonemes in order that they be spoken, correct?) The  Prosodic Body re-situates "Emotional and Interactional Prosody" interoceptively (as bodily feeling). Although it's common to restrict consideration of prosody to the process of phonation sourced at the larynx, filtered through the vocal tract and emitted as suprasegmental acoustic energy, perhaps the full dramaturgy of prosody actually begins in the enteric nervous system as gut feelings that prime pulmonic pressure as airflow undergoes channeling and obstruction to form fricative or vocalic or plosive frequencies. This same biomechanical, vibrational circuit at once signals the pulsatile Hypothalamus Pituitary Adrenaline Axis — the secretory and synaptic story of speech. The science of this phonic/neurohormonal sync is sometimes known, simply, as mantra. In manasa-japa mantra the sound is one thousand times more potent when repeated only mentally, without moving the tongue or lips. How subtle can things get; to what extent can sound subtilize the body? The vagus nerve (parasympathetically controlling the heart, lungs, digestive tract and speech organs) is the primary prosodic and somatosensory nerve. Neuroscientist and polyvagal theorist Stephen Porges points out that “our culture is so functionally linked to syntax … we forget that prosody is the mediator of how we feel.” Our ability to be intimate is tuned by the tautening or loosening of the smallest skeletal muscle in the body, the stapedius, which is innervated by the quality of our voices via the ventral vagal pathway. With regard to brain regions, prosody (as music and speech combined) is cross-lateral and integrationist. The primary auditory cortex is tonotopically organized, with neighboring cells in the cortex responding to neighboring frequencies, matching the tonotopic map along the basilar membrane of the inner ear. The Prosodic Body will trace sound waves through the elements: air into ear canal to earth of ossicles oscillating cochlear water that transmits electrical impulses along the auditory nerve directly to the brain. Prosody primes meaning by priming physiology. The paralinguistic is implicit in physiology, with full inter-individual implications. Social and somatosensory interactions coincide. It takes an entire visceral system, and a village, to vocalize. Is "social synapse" only an analogy? Prosody favored the evolution of rhythmicity, emotional processing, group coordinator and the inclination to cooperate. Does prosody express feelings, or feelings prosody? We'll learn by means of vocal/somatic practices, and build upon prosody's well established phylogenic and ontogenic record by picking up the epigenetic potential of prosody as "creativity." 

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THE MEDIUM IS THE MEDICINE 

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Extending the Prosodic Body, this session will explore the ways in which the phonic and connotative qualities of language influence health and wellbeing. Facial gestures, rhythmic body movements, intonation and the musicality of speech regulate us from the time we’re newborns. Harshness and absence of prosody virtually assure developmental difficulty, misattunement, and “disorganized attachment.” There are of course many vibrational therapies (singing bowls, radiation, tuning forks, color therapy, etc.) but in keeping with implicate prosody we’ll focus on the voice, particularly the two principal approaches to vocal therapy: catharsis and kenosis. This particular, vocalized, sense of catharsis stems from modern psychotherapy — Freud’s “talking cure” and Lacan’s parole pleine — and Alfred Wolfsohn’s voice-work. To a great extent catharsis assumes the existence of psychosomatic trauma and blockage and equates complete use of one’s vocal spectrum, emotional release, and full expression of self. Kenosis, on the other hand, is self-emptying, akin to Mahāyāna Buddhist sunyata (in which the self has no intrinsic substance) and bodhicitta (one’s awakening that benefits others). Mantra, for example, makes use of a deliberately reduced and repetitive sound sequencing. And in the Eastern Orthodox Church, kenosis is for theosis, not self-gnosis. Paracelsus said “Medicine should be based upon truth and not upon verbal sleight-of-hand.” What kind of words are wisdom? Is truth itself medicinal? Prosody works within the body. Can prosody re-intone the mercenary, duplicitous history of English from within the body politic? This session will involve word-bodywork and prosody's history of healing, as well as the pathologies of prosody, such as aprosodia, dysprosodia and speech apraxia. “Healing is a function of how we address ourselves.” — George Quasha. 

 

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COHERENCE

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Coupled with therapeutic prosody, and wagering that 21st century medicine will be based on biophysics, cellular communication and frequency science, this session will inquire into the auspicious (even responsible) positioning of prosody for contributing to so-called energy medicine. We'll look at an anticipatory poetics in which we’ll experimentally place out-of-date and dangerous mainstream medicine in a more complete bioregulatory communication, starting with Herbert Frölich’s research into crystalline molecular arrays and the ultra-resonant poetry of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Assessing where human being is at right now, we’ll put aside past (failed?) (extinctual?) paradigms of chaos, coercion (colonialization), competition, dissonance, cooperation and compassion and reflect on coherence as key to our continuation. Biophysics reveals the crystalline nature of living tissues and the astonishing and instantaneous coherence of the collective pathways of a biosystem. Technically, “coherence” just means an open application of quantum physics to biology. The open application of prosody to biophysics has both phonic and connotative implications. Physiological regulatory systems that are extremely sensitive to energy fields are also responsive to vibrational phenomena such as vocal frequency. In a coherent system, binaries such as collective/individual, local/global solitary/synergy, are no longer contradictory. For dealing with the paradoxical, apophatic nature of phenomena, prosody is unsurpassed. We’ll approach language as medicine per se, and as that without which a therapy of any kind can’t be fully effective — the anagnorisis of the cause of the sickness, if you will. Along with biophysics, the spagyrics of Paracelsus (i.e., magnolia, mysteria, aracana: wonder, mystery, the hidden) will also serve as a correlate of prosodic practice.

 

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PEACE

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Taking into consideration all that has been brought forth as a fully implicated prosody, there will be a closing, send-off session focused on “peace” as a way of moving forward by crossing, respecting, reconciling and dissolving divides in our explosive world — divides such as denotation/connotation, inhumanity/humanity, me/you, us/them, ideology/openness, sound/meaning, freedom/collective, austerity/abundance, debtor/creditor, avant-garde/border-guard, and of course the dogged audiovisual divide and reduced sensorium of acousmatics (voice or sound whose source is not seen) versus aphonia (written text without voice) characteristic of the last century.

 

   

 

upcoming:    

                                                                                                           

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PROSODY AND INTRINSIC AWARENESS

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CROSS-SPECIES PROSODY

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PROSODY ENERGETICS

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