4. THE QUESTIONS
The actual beginning stages of speech are known as the “babbling period”, during which, children produce an astonishing quantity and diversity of sounds. They can accumulate articulations which are never found within a single language, or even a group of languages – consonants of any kind of articulation, sibilants, clicks, complex vowels, diphthongs etc. The child, at the height of their babbling period can produce all conceivable sounds. Listening to my daughter's linguistic development, I cannot help thinking that the most avant-garde approach to language in terms of phrasing, pitch relations, timbre, dynamics, even content, can be found in an infant's and toddler'speech. Even If we can't copy an infant's speaking system, we can sense how instinct intervenes in their expression, according to what their “super-urgent” need is. It is an uncritical, uninfluenced and authentic demonstration of expression.
Both the prelinguistic stage and aphasic disorders share an instinctive state of functioning. Because of the structured way we learn to be, act, compose, we are forgetting more and more how to approach or use these primal innate forces. Diving into these two states is a great learning, both for the theoretical information to be found and for the fact that our investigation is happening within an instinct-driven environment.
4.1. Words are prisons to escape from
This phrase can be approached in many different ways, also as an extension of the cost of the passing from the prelinguistic to the linguistic stage. The “molecule” is the word, where it all starts.
The prelinguistic period provides us both with practical information for the foundations of our very communication code and also with a view to our roots and the ways our mind is shaped.
As creators, what we learn, plainly said, is to seek a type of material that will bring us in contact with our real “selves”. We usually imagine this as a step towards “innovation”, a step forward, in relation to where we start from. In the case of working on language or text, this process takes the form of departing from a certain text, and moving towards its deconstruction or the re-synthesis of the material. What if all the texts we are working as composers with, are seen under the light of this phrase? What if the texts we know, and, even more, the language we speak, is “the prison we are trapped inside” and need to forget?
And then more questions arise:
Is the creative deconstruction creators look for a step forward or a step backwards?
Is it about learning new things or is it about forgetting and remembering?
What if we would abruptly disrupt all the natural processes that led us to our evolution as speaking beings?
What kind of emotional openness does it take to approach such questions?
Even though this research paper is practice – oriented, these questions follow the trail, both of the thoughts and the applications, that precede or follow.
And, eventually, the practice-based question:
In what ways can we apply information resulting from the prelinguistic stage or aphasia, to vocal music?