Qualia as Facts of Firstness

To speak of voice is to speak of air, so let me begin with an example of the semiotics of air in motion, wind:

For more than two decades, many students of cultural semiosis have learned the fundamentals of Charles Peirce’s theory of signs through Richard Parmentier’s anecdote of two golfers as they interact with one another by jointly “taking account of the wind.” One central concern of Parmentier’s discussion in this first chapter of Signs in Society was to demonstrate Peirce’s revolutionary conceptualization of thirdness in relation to firstness and secondness. Within the Peircean doctrine of signs, firstness, secondness, and thirdness form the fundamental categories, which can function as distinctive features of sign partials; these differentiable sign partials, furthermore, have combinatorial potentials and limits across various trichotomies. These concepts have become indispensable analytic tools for a semiotically informed anthropology of communication that situates the Saussurean solution to thirdness (the relation between signification and value in a virtual system of differential relations across planes of linguistic analysis) within a broader, comparative ethnographic investigation of social pragmatics and the metapragmatic thirdness of culture. In addition to divesting Peirce for nonintimates, Parmentier’s anecdote of “taking account of the wind” foregrounds the vital function of semiotic mediation along dialectically related vectors of determination and representation in the production of a cultural concept of wind by which an ontology of wind can be posited as interactionally relevant.

In this essay, I also focus on the problem of the semiotic mediation of ontology for a scientific epistemology based on ethnographic research (i.e., sociocultural anthropology). By analyzing a recording of a voice lesson that I observed in Chicago in 2007, I return to the problem of becoming “acquainted with the object” that Parmentier offers as a condition of possibility for complex semiotic relationships like “taking account of the wind.” In addition to the behavioral attributes of an object (e.g., that air in motion blows in a direction) and its effects (that the motion of air can cause other objects to move, quickly or slowly, foul or favorably), these two golfers know the wind by its predicable sensuous qualities (strong, weak; hard, soft; cold, warm; malodorous, sweet). We can imagine a sort of everyday doctrine of immediate perception, where the wind “is” a synthesis of these various semiotic phenomena to the golfers. Upon observation and reflection, as every scientist knows, the wind as it “is” in a particular moment can be retroductively assimilated to what it “ought to be” theoretically in every moment. This “ought” is not a moral assertion, a standard, or a norm. Rather, the “ought” is an inferential process of what Peirce called “abduction.” By reflecting upon what the wind “is” in terms of what it, under all relevant conditions, “ought” to be, our golfers can arrived at a kind of tacit, rudimentary, settled science, that can seem for a time to collapse the fact/value distinction (Putnam Reference Putnam2004). For the pragmaticist golfer who “holds that the purport of any concept is its conceived bearing upon our conduct” (CP 5:460), the wind ought to be conceptualized and dealt with as being whatever it is that will help and not hinder their efforts to play a game of golf.

Now let us imagine another interactional setting, a voice lesson. Like the golf game, two or more persons are in a collaborative process of discovering, conceptualizing, and taking account of a culturally stipulated ontology. However, this time the thinginess of the thing they are discerning is a direct result of their individual actions, not a force external to their immediate actions. As in a game of golf, what this thing is at any given moment is evaluated and manipulated according to what it ought to be in all moments. However, in this new situation, the people are not only orienting and adjusting to variations in the behavior of this thing, but are also actively producing this thing through their own behavior. Each variation is a direct causal outcome of their activities. In this finely tuned pragmatic nexus of phonic engagement and sonic orientation, human action and reaction are continuous and mutually constitutive (Harkness Reference Harkness2014).

More like a golf swing than the wind, the voice in this setting is encountered as a bundle of sensuous impressions, exteroceptive and interoceptive, taken up differently by the different participants in the interaction. Vocal technique is a process of gaining semiotic awareness of and control over these impressions, and successful vocal instruction is a genre of activity where two or more people come to agreement over these impressions, despite their differently situated epistemic access to them. Students of voice navigate these impressions by orienting to generalizable, predicable qualities. These qualities have labels like open versus closed, relaxed versus tense, smooth versus rough, soft versus hard, and so on. These qualities are abstracted hypostatically from predicates (from soft to softness) according to culturally stipulated aesthetic and ethical frameworks of value, positive and negative. Peirce called qualities operating as signs qualisigns, which occupied the first place in the first division of his three semiotic trichotomies—a division according to “the sign itself.”

For Peirce a quality “cannot actually act as a sign until it is embodied; but the embodiment has nothing to with its character as a sign” (Reference PeirceEP 2:291; see also CP 4.244). The character of a qualisign remains that of quality (Parmentier Reference Parmentier1994, 38–39), whether its embodiment is the simplest of sense data (e.g., “feeling of red”) or the most complex assemblage of actions (see, e.g., Munn Reference Munn1986 on buoyancy). For Peirce, a quality is “a mere abstract potentiality” (Reference Peirce, Hartshorne, Weiss and BurksCP 1.422) not dependent on mind, on some material entity, or on sense. Qualities belong to the realm of firstness, “not referring to anything nor lying behind anything” (i.e., a monadic state, a ground; Reference Peirce, Hartshorne, Weiss and BurksCP 1.356–57). Our empirical access to qualities (conceptualized as true firstness) is through qualisigns (firstness functioning as genuine signs), a condition of which is their embodiment—their manifestation—in sign vehicles.

Readers familiar with Peirce’s trichotomies will immediately notice the gap between qualities as a first degree of the category of firstness and qualisigns as a third degree, that is, genuine sign, of the category of firstness. Filling this categorial gap are qualia as a second degree, that is, what Peirce called “facts of firstness” (Reference PeirceEP 2:272): “In the ideas of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, the three elements, or Universal Categories, appear under their forms of Firstness. They appear under their forms of Secondness in the ideas of Facts of Firstness, or Qualia, Facts of Secondness, or Relations, and Facts of Thirdness, or Signs; and under their forms of Thirdness in the ideas of Signs of Firstness, or Feeling, i.e., things of beauty; Signs of Secondness, or Action, i.e., modes of conduct; and Signs of Thirdness, or Thought, i.e., forms of thought” (Peirce Reference Peirce, Bergman and Paavola1903).

In a paper on Peirce’s semiotic approach to phenomenology and the organization of what Peirce called the phaneron, the “total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind” (CP 1.284), Nathan Houser (Reference Houser and Cobley2010) provides a helpful distillation of Peirce’s categories to situate qualia in terms of their apparent facticity, that is, appearing “in their secondness.” Whereas Peirce adopted the term haecceity (thisness) from medieval philosopher Duns Scotus to refer to pure secondness (CP 1.405),Footnote ⁵ “qualia” refer to elements of firstness that appear in their secondness:

What, then, does Peirce mean by “facts” in this typology? Peirce offers the following explanation of secondness as a defining feature of facts:

A quality is a first, a mere abstract potentiality, a true monad, “a special suchness with some degree of determination, not, however, thought as more or less,” “itself without parts or features, and without embodiment” (CP 1.303). A qualisign, however, is a genuine semiotic object, a third with the character of firstness composed of a sign vehicle (its embodiment as a feeling), an object, and an interpretant. The semiotic middle space between qualities and qualisigns is constituted by qualia. And the classic “principle of excluded middle,” according to Peirce, characterizes the individual fact.

In this discussion of the “excluded middle,” Peirce enumerates twelve features of facts. Here is his summary of the first seven:

And of the five additional features of facts according to Peirce, let me highlight three more (presented in truncated form), which are especially salient for our semiotic conceptualization of qualia:

Finally, as “facts of firstness” that both occupy the “middle” of the category of firstness between qualities and qualisigns and are subject to the “principle of excluded middle,” qualia specifically are defined by the following features:

Finally, the self-contained unity of qualia may be differentiated from the degree concept of vividness or intensification. Peirce speaks of the “distinction between two kinds of consciousness, the quale-consciousness and that kind of consciousness which is intensified by attention, which objectively considered, I call vividness, and as a faculty we may call liveliness” (CP 6.222; see also CP 6.308–9). Let me now draw together the salient points for the present discussion: qualia are facts of firstness that consist in features that happen here and now, that exhibit a unitary, synthesized character, however complex upon reflection, which is not (yet) predicated, that are subject to the “principle of excluded middle,” and that occupy a “middle” between quality as mere abstract potentiality (true firstness) and qualisigns as feelings, which constitute genuine semiotic objects (firstness functioning as genuine signs).

As Brian Keeley (Reference Keeley, Symons and Calvo2009, 81) explains, although Peirce talked about qualia in sensuous terms to emphasize their experiential presence in whatever semiotic mode, he did not conceptualize qualia as sensory input or simple sense data.Footnote ⁷ Unlike the more explicitly sensory understanding of qualia (e.g., in the work of C. I. Lewis [Reference Lewis1929] and his student, Nelson Goodman [Reference Goodman1966]), the earlier and “alternative Peirce-qualia account emphasizes the importance of those elements of conscious experience that do not fall neatly under the heading of ‘sensory experience’” (Keeley Reference Keeley, Symons and Calvo2009, 86). Nor did Peirce conceptualize qualia as variations on fundamental categories of quality, whether “primary” or “secondary.” Although we may think of qualia as a particular blueness of blue or sweetness of sweet, we may also speak of the particular todayness of today or the citiness of the city—taking the phenomenological at any scale before its features are further analyzed and decomposed into different components. Notice, then, that this careful, semiotic treatment of qualia pertains as much to affect as it does to discourse, as much to the material as to the ideational. That is, it is the particular, unitary, sensuously present facts of firstness that define qualia, not the actualization or degree of a given quality—not, in the mode of Aristotle, as variation or intensification of quality as “a kind of alteration, which nevertheless leads neither to a corruption of the subject, nor to a mutation of the quality into its opposite” (Solere Reference Solere2001, 583; cf. CP 1.439 cited above). Rather, as I have highlighted above, Peirce thought of qualia as self-contained particularities of experience that, to “quale consciousness,” are completely unitary, each with a character a unique unto itself (cf. “comparing consciousness,” “vividness,” “liveliness,” “intensity,” etc., above).

Qualisigns thus would seem to have a navigational function in the pragmatics of the “pure indescribable quale which is gone in the twinkling of an eye and which bears no resemblance to any memory of it. It is just the quality of the immediately present, which is continually pouring through us, always here but never stopping to be examined. It is always fresh, always new, sporting in unbounded manifoldness” (Reference PeirceW 6:214). Qualisigns shape the projective discernment of qualia, making qualia as subjects seem to demand comparison and predication. Predicable qualisigns are both the pathway into qualia and the first semiotic responders to the metapragmatic incorporation of qualia into cultural schemata knowledge. It is then through reflexive metapragmatic attention that qualia are assimilated as comparable experiences by degrees of intensity or vividness, as “more or less” the same or different.

The basic point is that qualia—as facts of firstness, as the synthesized features of subjects prior to predication, as a pragmatic middle between qualities and qualisigns—are cultural emergents. They form raw semiotic material for predicating properties of entities and activities in the world according to, on the one hand, culturally conceptualized qualities and, on the other hand, feelings of these qualities in the form of conventional qualisigns. When these sensuous pragmatic signals are assimilated to conventional qualisigns of value, they can be “downshifted” (rhematized) from the indexical mode to the iconic mode (Parmentier 1994), appearing as the realia or properties of entities available to sensory experience (see, e.g., Harkness [Reference Harkness2013] on the various qualia assimilated to “softness” as a qualisign of soju in South Korea). And when assimilated as rhematized indexes, qualia can focus attention on the “feeling of doing,” providing the pragmatic material for organizing and valorizing genred activity—“practice”—according to culturally valorized qualisigns (Harkness Reference Harkness2015). Combining these two functions, qualia have a crucial capacity to link the thinginess of things with the feeling of doing within a broader pragmatic semiotics of culture (Parmentier Reference Parmentier1997; Keane Reference Keane2003; Manning Reference Manning2012; Chumley and Harkness Reference Chumley and Harkness2013).

There is, however, an obvious methodological problem. If qualia are supposed to be ineffable, ephemeral, incomparable, and inherently introspective, how do we study them? Or, rather, how do we study their pragmatic role in and consequence for social life? I take up this question in the remainder of my essay by examining field data on the training of the human voice. Focusing closely on one recording of a voice lesson that I observed, I discuss the way the qualisign of “openness” serves a navigational function in developing the singer’s “quale consciousness” of voice and its production within a European classical tradition. I demonstrate how qualia emerge through the sociosemiotic division of labor between the singer and the teacher as the teacher attempts guide the student toward certain modes of semiotic awareness of and control over his body. The voice in this example is revealed to be an interactionally produced cultural ontology.

These data suggest that a methodological approach to the ineffable, ephemeral, incomparable, and introspective is possible by carefully examining how the intersubjective becomes the subjective, the interactional produces the ontological, the exterior illuminates and characterizes the interior. Like qualia, the voice as phonosonic nexus is encountered as a slippery, shape-shifting object of action and reflection, repeatedly “found” and “lost” through processes of training and performance—both processual and objectified, internal and external, naturally emergent and intentionally produced, familiar and mysterious. As one voice teacher put it to me, “There is no such thing as perfect singing. It’s like herding sheep. Great singers know how to shuffle the voice down an imaginary corridor. That’s what makes it so exciting.”

The Interactional Emergence of Voice

How does one “open” the throat? One major aspect of vocal technique that students struggle with is learning to lower subglottic pressure in order to relax the muscles around the larynx and use formant resonance (rather than subglottic pressure or tension in the jaw or tongue) for amplitude and timbre. However, there are trained singers who, despite their well-developed technique, sometimes sound as if a small, rounded object were lodged somewhere in their throats (this also is sometimes the sonic effect of older recording technologies that captured only narrow swatches of audible sound). The image of an object in the throat corresponds to the sound of an obstructed vocal tract. This sound is often referred to as a “Knödel,” the German word for a boiled dumpling, which also is etymologically related to the diminutive form of the German word for knot (der Knoten) as well as noodle (die Nudel). In the case of well-trained classical singers, there is nothing lodged in the person’s throat. The Knödel sound is often the effect of particular singers’ production of what is called the “singer’s formant” (Sundberg Reference Sundberg1987), where formants 3, 4, and 5 cluster around 3000 Hz, using a combination low subglottic pressure, low larynx, expanded pharynx, raised velum, and rhotacization.Footnote ⁸ The singer’s formant creates the so-called ring in the voice and allows singers to produce sounds that can be heard over large orchestras. In some singers, however, a particular combination of articulation and phonation, combined with this concentration of peaks of acoustic energy (the singer’s formant), is interpreted by listeners as the sound of a mysterious “thing” lodged somewhere in vocal tract. The quality of vocal sound is characterized by an inference regarding its production. To the listener, the throat “sounds” constricted or obstructed.

Occasionally people mock opera singers by taking the Knödel model and producing what is sometimes called, in English, a “froggy” voice.”Footnote ⁹ The “frogginess” of the voice involves raising the larynx high in the vocal tract, often to the extent that one can no longer feel it with the hand when touching the throat. Given that opera singers use a lowered larynx in their method of vocal sound production, why would this parodic version do the opposite? Consider figure 1. To create this spectrogram, first I blew a C on a pitch pipe. Then I spoke the vowel [e] on the pitch of middle C. Then I sang [e] on the pitch of middle C using the froggy voice. Then I sang the [e] on middle C, exploiting the singer’s formant.

Figure 1.

Spectrogram of voice modifications on middle C

Pitch pipe C spoken [e] froggy-voice [e] sung [e]

As the spectrogram shows, the froggy voice, like the operatic voice, concentrates frequencies around 3000 Hz. In the case of the imitators of opera singers, an apperceptive bias (Boas Reference Boas1889) seems to lead amateur listeners to attempt to produce the timbre of the singer’s formant—that is, what they “hear” in the voice—through various forms of “motor equivalence” (Ladefoged Reference Ladefoged2006), especially, a high-larynx approach to produce a sound that is in fact produced with a low larynx. As such, what trained ears hear as the “ring” of the singer’s formant, that is, the narrowing of the upper formants, the untrained ear likely hears as a narrowing of the vocal tract. The Knödel becomes the sensuous orientation point—a deceptive sound.

In 2006, I met a singer who had a distinctively froggy voice. The singer, a baritone in his late twenties, had been a cantor for Jewish services in Chicago and Israel but had begun to “lose” his voice and was unable to perform. He described his dilemma in terms of “loss” because he could no longer sing at services. It had become painful to phonate, and the sounds that emerged were unpleasant to hear. He was taking voice lessons to prevent further vocal “loss” so that he could continue to lead services with his singing voice. He repeatedly told me: “It feels like I am learning to walk again.” I was able to observe one of his voice lessons with a voice teacher in Chicago, a professional singer and instructor in her midforties.

The transcript below (lines 1–115) captures a conversation between the student and the teacher, as the student struggles to sing with a descended larynx (T = teacher, S = student). The teacher tells him to “open the throat,” but the student is having trouble verifying that his throat is in fact open. The feeling of openness evades him, although he insists that he understands it conceptually. And although he can consciously manipulate the placement of his larynx, he says he cannot “feel” it when it ascends during vocalization. As the lesson proceeds, it is organized increasingly around transcending the limits of metapragmatic awareness (Silverstein Reference Silverstein and Duranti[1981] 2001) to produce a kind of quale consciousness of certain elements of singing, so that various qualia can serve as the empirical pathway to the technically correct qualisigns of openness and, more generally, the to the culturally appropriate production of voice. I have highlighted these moments with spectrographic analysis to bring the explicitly phonosonic dimensions of the process into view.

1. 1. T: Good. It may sometimes not be exactly where you want it

2. 2. S: right

3. 3. T: but you’re not getting the, that real grabby thing

4. 4. S: that’s good, [yawning]

5. 5. T: that was happening before. I didn’t really hear

6. 6. S: ok

7. 7. T: too much of that

8. 8. S: It’s hard for me to you know

9. 9. T: that’s good

10. 10. S: I really, I feel like I have no idea if my larynx is coming up or not

11. 11. T: mm hmmm

12. 12. S: I mean when you say “your larynx is up”

13. 13. T: mm hmmm

14. 14. S: Nothing’s registering

15. 15. T: mm hmmm

16. 16. S: inside for me

17. 17. T: mm hmmm

18. 18. S: You know that’s indicating to me oh my larynx is up

19. 19. T: mm hmmm

20. 20. S: I don’t know if there’s somewhere I should, I should, [inaudible] sure could feel it [inaudible]

21. 21. T: Yeah

22. 22. S: I should do, or

23. 23. T: Yeah, well, it’s, it’s easier to perceive in other people probably

24. 24. S: right

25. 25. T: but, but you’ll, you will learn, you’ll learn

26. 26. S: ok

27. 27. T: to feel it. I mean, you know, one of the things you can do is just, just play around with dropping it, you know, we talked about the ways you can make it drop

28. 28. S: right

29. 29. T: um, it doesn’t hurt to just kinda practice dropping

30. 30. S: yeah, that I can feel

31. 31. T: your larynx without even

32. 32. S: right

33. 33. T: making any sound

34. 34. S: right. I can feel what I did there was like I did that and tried to lift the back of my palate

35. 35. T: mm hmmm

36. 36. S: you know that’s like, that’s like a you know

37. 37. T: so if I said your larynx is high that’s what you would do

38. 38. S: yeah

39. 39. T: right, ok, so you can correct it

40. 40. S: right

41. 41. T: you’re just not always noticing that it’s slipped

42. 42. S: I just can’t tell that it’s happened yet

43. 43. T: uh huh, yeah, well because as we sing higher, again it does, it’s still, you know, we’re always looking for it in a, in the relatively low position

44. 44. S: right

45. 45. T: I mean it isn’t as low when you sing high notes as it is when you sing very low notes

46. 46. S: right

47. 47. T: so you know you’re ascending and naturally your larynx is, is, position is coming up

48. 48. S: right

49. 49. T: a little bit and so it’s easy to not notice that it’s come up a lot

50. 50. S: right

51. 51. T: But you know [plays C on the piano] when you, when I, if I say open throat, does that, I mean that’s that

52. 52. S: I mean open throat means something to me

53. 53. T: mm hmm

54. 54. S: but I’m not sure if it has anything to do with the larynx. It could

55. 55. T: Well

Before the teacher can continue, the student begins to demonstrate what he thinks the quality of “open” corresponds to in terms of the throat. He demonstrates what he thinks of as “openness” in singing, namely, a kind of unobstructed, continuous stream of sound. He begins with a phonic burst on a B articulated as “uh,” and he follows with an unintelligible stretch of phonation and articulation, followed by a lengthened diphthong [a] that transitions to [ə], and finally the word “open.”Footnote ¹⁰

Figure 2.

Spectrogram of line 56 (19:41–19:43)

1. 56. S: uh (inaudible) [a:::::::::::::::::::::::::::ə::::] [op ::::n]

The teacher responds with a correction. Whereas the student attempts to define “openness” as legato phrasing—a musically connected line, without breaks—the teacher directs the student’s attention to the site of vocal production. To do so, she uses an example that breaks explicitly from the legato conceptualization of “openness.” She produces disconnected, punctuated bursts of phonation in the form of a C-major arpeggio. These exercises are based on short, detached bursts of air that are focused on controlling airflow and establishing a causal relation with the tone, such that movements of the diaphragm are directly connected with phonation. She invokes a characterological figure—Santa Claus and his signature laugh—to expand the array of qualia for the student to reflect upon, predicate, and assimilate to the emergent concept of “openness” as it relates to the interactionally emergent ontology of voice (figs. 3, 4). The teacher shifts from a narrowed qualic focus—the anatomical specificity of the larynx within a more general space of the throat—to an expanded one. She synthesizes in a familiar character features that include a corpulent body that is “bigger” than his sound; a robust, outgoing personality; aged authority; a belt tied around the protruding stomach, and so on. Although familiar as a figure in the popular imagination, it is also a markedly Christian model, making it an odd pedagogical choice for this student.

1. 57. T: When your larynx is high, your throat’s not

2. 58. S: Right, uh huh

3. 59. T: Can’t really be open

4. 60. S: It’s engaged

5. 61. T: Mmm hmm

6. 62. S: Ok, uh

7. 63. T: Let’s do some staccati [plays D on the piano]

8. 64. S: OK

9. 65. T: [plays C on the piano] How about

Figure 3.

Spectrogram of line 66 (19:57–20:01)

1. 66. T: [C][o][ho] [ho] [ho] [ho:::::::::::::::] [S: yawning] [S: yawning]

2. 67. T: It’s ok. We like to stimulate that yawning reflex

Figure 4.

Spectrogram of line 68 (20:08–20:11)

1. 68. S: [o] [ho] [ho] [ho] [ho::::::::::::::::::::]

2. 69. T: Ok, that could be, again, lower larynx

3. 70. S: Ok

4. 71. T: Opener throat, or I could say more like Santa Claus

In this interaction, a tension emerges between the quale consciousness of voice and gradients of intensification or vividness of its qualisigns of value. One the one hand, the teacher employs various descriptions to try to stimulate the student’s quale consciousness: from the anatomical (“low larynx”), to the more impressionistic (“open throat”), to other experiences involving the mouth and throat (“yawn reflex”; sometimes “breathing through scuba mask”), to the characterological (the “ho ho ho” of Santa Claus). These are intended to stimulate and bring to awareness the various qualitative facts of vocalization that are to be manipulated. At the same time, she relies on degrees of comparison—lower larynx, opener throat, more like Santa Claus—to sort and assimilate these facts according to differently valorized of qualisigns. This is a complex metapragmatic process of invoking the abstract potentiality of openness, positing a feeling of openness, a qualisign, as the navigational orientation point, and then actively generating facts of firstness in the form of qualia to link the quality to the feeling and the feeling to the voice. The student’s progress is dependent on his ability to personally internalize the general “we” of the generic professional singing throat, for example, when the teacher says, “We like to stimulate that yawning reflex.” This way the student can isolate, sort, regiment, assimilate, and discard qualia according to the principle of excluded middle, that is, that “of [the fact] every quality whatever is either true or false.” (CP 1.436).

As the student struggles to feel when his larynx ascends, the teacher notices that the larynx ascends and the throat “closes” when the student sings across intervals of pitch. She points out that the student’s voice sonically “fades” on descending glissandi, and she further enlarges the anatomical domain of “openness” from the throat proper to the entire respiratory apparatus. She points out that the student’s larynx ascends and the throat “closes” when he stops “expanding” his ribcage. In addition to images of the larynx, the throat, Santa Claus, and so on, this new information draws in another domain of qualia to discern the problematic qualisigns of “openness.” The teacher asks the student to imagine that he his wearing a corset, and that an expanding ribcage produces the sensation of pressing against the corset. The imaginary resistance of this imaginary corset is yet another pragmatic field through which to become aware of the facts of firstness pertaining to voice. And with the introduction of the corset as a sensuous image to guide the student’s singing, the teacher has introduced another figure for the student to imagine, this time markedly gendered, rather than religious. She plays a descending interval from E to C, which the student attempts to sing on an [o] vowel without “fading.” In the spectrogram below, “fading” is captured by the relative whiteness at 3000 Hz.

Figure 5.

Spectrogram of line 72 (28:58–29:04)

1. 72. S: o::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2. 73. T: eh eh eh, ok, that … um …

3. 74. S: I don’t know what’s fading. Something’s like

4. 75. T: It’s the, it’s the corset. You need to, you need to

5. 76. S: The corset, ok

6. 77. T: Yeah, yeah, you need to

7. 78. S: ok, all right

8. 79. T: use the corset more to change [inhales through the nose and begins to play the piano]

In figure 6, the raised larynx corresponds to acoustic energy at higher frequencies.

Figure 6.

Spectrogram of line 80 (29:15–22)

1. 80. S: o::::::::::: T: No, no, no, opener [E] S: o::::::::::

2. 81. T: You know, it’s just like, it sounds like it’s just squishy here, I hear

Figure 7.

Spectrogram of line 82 (29:25–32)

1. 82. T: o::::::::: S: right T: instead of o::::::::::::::::::::

2. 83. T: You gotta really think you’re expanding here. I could, I got a belt I could tie around your chest

3. 84. S: [laughing]

4. 85. T: if you like

Eventually, the teacher does fasten a belt around the singer’s ribcage. The exercise is designed to help the student use the sensation of an expanded ribcage, initially produced by the belt’s resistance against the skin, as an index to confirm that he has a lowered, evenly phonating larynx. The belt’s resistance against the skin is clearly meant to stimulate a certain kind of haptic sensory experience. However, understood within a more striking cultural image of the corset, it is supposed to produce a more semiotically complex, culturally specific, sensuous synthesis of the experience of singing in the form quale consciousness. These various pedagogical moves are intended to help the student rely on the body as a deictic origo of indexical information, from which he can further parse the specific kinaesthetic dimensions of singing. This way, he can become aware of and can control the coordinative structure of a closed circuit of indexical relations among navigational feelings as well as emergent facts of “openness” at any point along the segmentable units of a musical phrase.

Figure 8.

Spectrogram of line 86 (29:39–40)

1. 86. T: [plays E-C] S: o::::::::::::::::::::: T: No, no, no, opener

Figure 9.

Spectrogram of line 87 (29:44–49)

1. 87. S: o::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: T: That’s, it’s just, it’s just kinda [inaudible]

2. 88. T: Can I tie this thing around you?

3. 89. S: Yeah, of course

4. 90. T: Have I done, have I done this once?

5. 91. S: No

6. 92. T: I’ve never done this?

7. 93. S: No

8. 94. T: Some people really love this

9. 95. S: Ok

10. 96. T: Cause, you know, it enables them to feel some feedback

    [The teacher ties the belt around student’s chest, just below the sternum]

11. 97. T: Ok, let’s see where we need to poke this thing through for you. So I want it to be fairly snug

12. 98. S: Right

13. 99. T: I’m always a little about, you know, like I’m gonna, you know

14. 100. S: Right

15. 101. T: cut off people’s breath or something, so you tell me if it’s too snug. But I tend to be [inaudible] about that

16. 102. S: It’s ok, I mean, it’s snug

17. 103. T: Yeah, but it’s not gonna

18. 104. S: Yeah, it’s not gonna

19. 105. T: Punch a new hole in here. It’s just kinda there

20. 106. [The teacher inhales audibly and walks back to the piano]

21. 107. T: Ok, see if you can break that thing for me

22. 108. S: Ok

23. 109. T: [Laughs] um, [plays F on the piano] let’s start at the beginning again

24. 110. S: [Placed one hand just below the sternum and the other on the throat to gauge the placement of the larynx]

Figure 10.

Spectrogram of line 111 (30:41–2)

1. 111. T: [plays F] S: [o::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::] T: Deeper [plays F]

Figure 11.

Spectrogram of line 112 (30:46–30:50)

1. 112. T: [Plays F] S: o:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: T: mmmm

2. 113. T: It lost depth as you went down

3. 114. S: Yes

4. 115. T: Ok, So you’re gonna, you’re gonna break that belt to go down [inhales audibly through the nose]

The exercises in this lesson are organized around honing the student’s sensuous orientation to various qualisigns of “openness.” These qualisigns are related first to the general area of the throat, and then elaborated through the more specific placement of the larynx, the expansion of the ribcage, the bellowing laugh of a characterological figure like Santa Claus, the constraining feminine garment called a corset, and finally a new domain of predicable feeling, “depth.” Ideally, the student will cultivate a quale consciousness of these different subjects as phonosonic facts of firstness, which he can then assimilate and integrate into skilled modes of focused attention on the feelings (i.e., qualisigns) of doing. To do so, he should learn to discern qualia at different scales of synthesis, whether as the total unity of voice or as more the fine grained but no less unified qualia of an open throat, a low larynx, Santa Claus, an expanded ribcage, a corset, or simply “depth.” The teacher’s job is to help the student find those sensuous facts that work best for achieving certain kinds of phonosonic effects. Once these qualia are brought into consciousness—however fleetingly and unevenly—and attention is focused on the feeling of doing, the student can begin to work specifically on the increasingly vivid feelings of doing more or less correctly. Correctness in this case is judged according to the culturally valorized quality of openness. These two forms of consciousness—of qualia and of vividness—combine in the semiotic cultivation of technique and the production and refinement of a cultural ontology of voice.