Bring Your Own Voice

“Get busy living or get busy dying”

I love it when people stop living someone else’s life and start living their own.  It’s always inspriring and I hold these people in the highest regard.  Halsey Burgund is one of these people.  Burgund woke up one day and decided his tech job was paying the bills but not the soul.  He had been dabbling in experimental music for some time, but one day he had a lightbulb moment and decided to combine his love of music and art and create what he calls the Bring Your Own Voice project.  The basic idea is that there is music in the way we talk, a certain lilt, twang, unique pattern, etc, so Burgund records people’s musings and then re-packages them as pieces of music.  It’s part spoken word, part music and all unique. We live in an increasingly sampled world and Burgund’s original approach underscores the belief that we are all capable of making art but when teamed with others the interpretations are boundless.

I was fortunate enough to have been one of the very first people to read for Burgund several years ago, and it’s amazing the extent to which he has taken this “installation/experiment”.  He has been in the hallowed halls of Yale and Harvard, museums such as the ICA, MOCA, and even the Boston Science Museum.  He’s also appeared on NPR, World Cafe Live and even ABC: ( CLICK HERE )

If you still don’t get it after watching the ABC video link here’s Burgund’s artist statement:

My inspiration to write music comes from a fascination with the human voice and language. We each have a unique voice that we use to communicate (and miscommunicate) each day, and our society relies on these language-based interactions to function. The human voice is clearly a powerful instrument when singing, but I use the voice as an instrument when simply speaking, as each of us does in our unique way every day. I create aural collages of people as represented by their own individual voices, while collectively representing my own voice.

I gather spoken voice recordings in the field primarily using a specially designed and built portable voice-recording booth. I call this booth the Bring Your Own Voice (BYOV) booth and am able to set it up in a wide variety of locations and situations including music clubs, outdoor fairs and art galleries. The booth acts as a private space, muffled from the rest of the world, where participants can read out loud pre-determined text or answer questions that I ask via a ‘reading sheet’. I use these recordings, in combination with traditional instruments, electronic instruments and singing voices, to create my music.

I explore the nuance of language in my pieces. The same word can be used in numerous ways and the context a word inhabits can be vastly influential on the resulting meaning. I like to play with words and rearrange them with each other into phrases, sentences, stanzas, etc. in intended and unintended ways. I also like to explore how each individual speaks. The way one intones words, the speed one speaks, the inflections one uses are all part of a unique aural fingerprint that identifies each person as an individual. I am fascinated by the variety and expressive capacity of the human voice and am often amazed at how musical this speech can be if treated as such.

I don’t feel that one needs to be a trained musician to be able to make an important and exciting contribution to a piece of music. There is music around us everyday - the music of communication, the music of human existence - that when processed and arranged by a musician, can emphasize to everyone who listens that there are beautiful and lyrical moments surrounding us all the time.

To check out more go to:

http://www.halseyburgund.com