iː ɡoʊ weɪ

Jonathan Reus

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

This semi-improvised performance explores abstract voice sounds, in the tradition of dadaist phonetic poetry, following a performer whose voice and verbality is slowly escaping him. The performance begins from the text of possibly the most well-known dadaist sound poem, Kurt Schwitters' 'Die Sonata in Urlauten' (Ursonate), and expands upon this text with additional speech-sounds and fragments of language collaged in collaboration with a predictive text model. As the performance progresses the performer’s voice is made increasingly distant from his own biological voice, augmented and transformed by real-time voice transfer models. The performer begins performing through a clone of his own voice that soon assimilates fragments of the voice of Jaap Blonk, one of the most celebrated living sound poets and performers of Ursonate. The performer's augmented voice moves onward, dissolving and coalescing into multi-human, polyphonic, choral and alien forms. The interest of this performance is to celebrate the unraveling of voice as a marker of identity.

Citation

Jonathan Reus. 2026. iː ɡoʊ weɪ. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20782112 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_music_29,
 abstract = {This semi-improvised performance explores abstract voice sounds, in the tradition of dadaist phonetic poetry, following a performer whose voice and verbality is slowly escaping him. The performance begins from the text of possibly the most well-known dadaist sound poem, Kurt Schwitters' 'Die Sonata in Urlauten' (Ursonate), and expands upon this text with additional speech-sounds and fragments of language collaged in collaboration with a predictive text model. As the performance progresses the performer’s voice is made increasingly distant from his own biological voice, augmented and transformed by real-time voice transfer models. The performer begins performing through a clone of his own voice that soon assimilates fragments of the voice of Jaap Blonk, one of the most celebrated living sound poets and performers of Ursonate. The performer's augmented voice moves onward, dissolving and coalescing into multi-human, polyphonic, choral and alien forms. The interest of this performance is to celebrate the unraveling of voice as a marker of identity.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {29},
 author = {Jonathan Reus},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20782112},
 editor = {Lia Mice and Nicole Robson and Tara Pattenden},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {Live Performance},
 numpages = {3},
 pages = {119--121},
 presentation-video = {https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3866796/3866858},
 title = {iː ɡoʊ weɪ},
 track = {Music},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_music_29.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}