How much meaning can I get out of a 27-inch piece of flat metal?
I began experimenting with what I call The Sawlk Box Technique while researching and developing my Sawpera (saw-opera), a larger project I am building around the expressive possibilities of the musical saw. The saw is an extraordinarily simple instrument: a flexible sheet of steel, bowed at its edge, whose pitch is shaped almost entirely by the physical manipulation of the metal. It can sing, but it cannot speak.
I wanted to see if I could change that.
The technique combines a musical saw with a talk box, routing the sound of the vibrating saw through a tube into my mouth. Instead of using my voice to produce the sound, I use the changing shape of my mouth and vocal tract as an acoustic filter, sculpting the saw’s harmonics into vowel and speech-like forms. The result sits somewhere between instrument and voice: the metal remains the sound source, but the human body gives that sound articulation.
For me, the experiment is less about making a saw literally “talk” than about testing the boundary between sound and language. How little acoustic information is necessary before we begin to hear intention, syllables, or meaning? How much of a voice can exist without a voice at all?
The Sawlk Box Technique is one ongoing answer: an attempt to coax language, character, and perhaps eventually drama out of one very resonant piece of steel. Eventually, my final Sawpera opus will demonstrate this fully.