The unconscious is structured like a language

In my ongoing attempt to sonify the Unconscious, I turned to recent generative AI speech models - systems trained on data sets of human vocal recordings that reproduce, through statistical patterning, the way a human might sound. In an earlier work, Music of the Sefiras, I used a cloned voice of Gershom Scholem delivering a fictional lecture generated through AI. In the process, I encountered strange vocal artifacts: sounds of his voice that carried no semantic function. I was drawn to these residues and incorporated them into the piece. I treated them like the Unconscious of the voice itself.

Ferdinand de Saussure famously asserted that "psychologically our thought - apart from its expression in words - is only a shapeless and indistinct mass." What, then, remains of the set of all vocal sounds once semantic sounds are taken away? In a recent lecture, the Lacanian philosopher Alenka Zupancic asks: "Given the enormous quantity of language (and 'discourse') we have uploaded into AI systems, have we also uploaded the Unconscious that is at work - or at stake - in these texts?" These questions resonated with my experience. The Lacanian perspective demystifies the Unconscious, framing it not as a hidden abyss but rather as a network of signifiers structured like language. Might the artifacts of AI speech models expose such signifiers, shaped by mechanisms of repression? And if these voice sounds no longer signify anything in reality, can they be heard simply as... music?

The present piece develops this inquiry by drawing on artificial, AI-generated vocal sounds and integrating them as musical material. I generated non-linguistic, bodyless vocal sounds and expanded them through the orchestral body into large-scale sonic processes. This continues my longstanding interest in sounds that inhabit the threshold between linguistic and musical expression, as in earlier works such as Moments incommunicables and Bocca Chiusa. I have often felt that within the field of sound, linguistic sounds correspond to conscious experience, while musical sounds approach the domain of the Unconscious. Here, the orchestra becomes a body where disembodied vocal residues are absorbed and transformed, opening a deliberately blurred formal space in which subterranean layers of the orchestral body can surface.