Sonic & Lyric

Professor Suzie Hanna gave a fascinating presentation on Sonic & Lyric design on 8 Nov 2023 as part of our In Conversation series. Sadly, the presentation failed to record... (my fault, Helen!). So here is the presentation in slides, notes and videos.

The presentation was divided into two sections:

The Live Poet's Voice
Voicing Dead Poets

Music and Sound Design were discussed throughout.

The Live Poet's Voice

Voice & Narrative

“The word can be reproduced and adapted in countless ways for the audio-visual medium, but the actual voice is also representative of the poet’s unique character and core identity, speaking from a particular place.”

S Tremlett, The Poetics of Poetry Film

Voice as Speech Act

Is the voice coming from intradiagetic or extradiagetic worlds?

[Note: The diegetic (or intradiegetic) level of a narrative is that of the story world, and the events that exist within it, while the extradiegetic or nondiegetic level stands outside these. In narrative cinema, the diegesis is a film's entire fictional world. Oxford Reference]

The Poet’s Own Voice in God’s Favour, Anne

Poem and self recorded voice Sally Bayley

Expanding the poem through performance

Lyric poetry, intradiagetic although mainly written in third person

Actor Maeve Hoare

Musicians Colin & Mary Stiff

Sound Design Phil Archer

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of the death of Anne Hathaway in summer 2023, this poem was commissioned for publication by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. The composite personality of the faithful and apprehensive Anne references a range of Shakespeare's female characters as well as Tudor Royalty . (The opening quote is Shylock’s from ‘The Merchant of Venice’.) Production techniques include animating flat puppets using an antique bottle as a lens and shadow play of hands and objects set into animated textures created under the camera with oil paints. Suzie Hanna

Notes from Sally Bayley

I wrote this poem as a way of thinking about Anne Hathaway as a metaphor for all the lost wives and daughters in literary and biblical history. And then as a way of thinking about the exigencies of poetry and the craft of the poet which compresses and reduces autobiography for the sake of the tight - you might even say cruel - craft of poetry. Life and love are traded in for the poet's commitment to his art. Meanwhile, Anne has a life of her own which is not seen or heard: after all, there have been many Annes in history forsaken by the will or status of their husbands. Disappearing Annes. This poem recalls young Anne Hathaway as it recalls lost wives - Shylock's Leah and his daughter Jessica - as a way of thinking about poems lost and lives left unrecorded: disappearing poetic moments in all our lives we have given away to others. What you might call the Romance of Life which takes but doesn't always return.

Music & Sound Design in God’s Favour, Anne

Original melody and performance

'Contemporaneous instrumentation recomposed as ‘ground’ in support the ‘figured’ vocal performance.' Walter Murch

Sounds from the original recording processed and recomposed into drones by sound designer Phil Archer.

Audience for God’s Favour, Anne

Literary, Academic, Festival and Family

The Poet’s Own Voice in The Lines

Dir: Suzie Hanna & Hayley Winter

Poetry & Voice: Andrew Motion

Composer: Sebastian Castagna

Professional voice recording

Permission given to Sebastian Castagna to recompose the voice.

'The animation and multimedia forms, and the symbolic use of sound, serve to respond to the nuanced stimuli of each of the words and phrases.'

Paul Wells – Animated Worlds 2006

Intradiagetic emphasised by the sound design which literally uses the voice to create the sonic landscape.

Music & Sound Design in The Lines

Design driven by the soundtrack

'the potential of the poetry film to extend the voice of the poet through devices such as synchronous text' S Tremlett, The Poetics of Poetry Film

Text on screen liberates the sound design

Audience: Film and Poetry Festivals, Sonimation Project, Shooting Rhymes & Cutting Verses

Voiced by Others in Known Unto God

Voiced by Stella Duffy, with Sound Design by Phil Archer.

Animated and Directed by Suzie Hanna

Poetry by Bill Manhire

Commissioned for Fierce Light by Writers Centre Norwich, Norfolk & Norwich Festival and 1418NOW.

Mud and and pigment animation interpreting Bill Manhire's poem about tragic death of youths in WW1, comprised of short epitaphs for unknown NZ soldiers killed at the Somme, and for unnamed refugees drowning as they flee from wars now, 100 years later. Each one given a highly compressed separate story told in the first person.

Music & Sound Design in Known Unto God

“The sound was constructed in a 'poetic' way, using metaphor and allusion to create new meaning. “

Phil Archer

Dialogues between Said and Shown

Michel Chion

Audience - Poetry Film & International Short Film Festivals, Gallery Exhibitions.

Voicing Dead Poets

Voice for Dead Poets in Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge

Hart Crane

Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge

Animations Suzie Hanna

Sound by Tom Simmons

Discussed: Ethics of Representation, the extent of the vast research, and permissions.

Music & Sound Design in Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge

Music from the Poet’s own Process

Sense of Place

Tom Simmons has built this into a resonant dramatic soundscape which interprets the materiality of the bridge, the surrounding land and waterscape and the 'prayerful' qualities of the Proem. He embeds sonic references to Hart Crane's 'shamanic process' in which the poet played records on his Victrola, including Ravel's 'Bolero', loudly and repeatedly , whilst drinking heavily and typing phrases in manic bursts.

This Poetry Animation is a representation of Hart Crane's iconic 'Proem' from his epic work 'The Bridge'. Suzie Hanna animated the film using hand cut stencils imitating some graphic aspects of contemporaneous 1920s New York artists who were in Hart Crane's coterie, such as Joseph Stella and Marsden Hartley. She also referenced Vorticism to capture vertiginous aspects of the verse. The voice of Tennessee Williams, who was an ardent admirer of Crane, is taken from a 1960 recording.

[The film is part of ongoing research into representation of poetic metaphor, between Sally Bayley, Tom Simmons and Suzie Hanna: their recent article 'Thinking Metaphorically and Allegorically: A Conversation between the fields of Poetry, Animation and Sound' was published in Autumn 2013 in the Journal of American Studies.]

Voice for Dead Poets in The Blue from Heaven

The Blue from Heaven a Legend of King Arthur of Britain

Glenda Jackson provides the voice of poet Stevie Smith in this animated interpretation of her extraordinary 1950's poem 'The Blue from Heaven'. Suzie Hanna has adapted and animated the poet's own drawings to communicate her rueful, wistful, comic, and melancholy themes with music and sound design by Phil Archer. © Suzie Hanna 2019

Storytelling broken by rhetorical verses.

'All these scenes of friendly elegant lines are rasped in a rough caress by Glenda Jackson’s throaty burr,…... Stevie Smith’s gentle childlike lines tell the story of loss, of the broken relationship…..' Jude Montague - FAD Magazine 2019

Director/Designer/Animator Suzie Hanna

Poem Stevie Smith

Sound Design Phil Archer

Voice Glenda Jackson

Vocal effects Felix Ospino Archer

Based on drawings by Stevie Smith

Advised by Noreen Masud & Sally Bayley

With kind permission of Hamish MacGibbon for the Stevie Smith Estate

Music and Sound Design for The Blue from Heaven

Sonic world:

Paper, typewriter and musical instruments from an English childhood

Construction:

Sound effects, silence and musical devices separate spaces

Synchronous sound and scene shifts

Huge thanks to Suzie Hanna for sharing these insights.