About the Project

Calling The Voice-O-Graph
Project Start Date: June 2007, Album Launch Date:October 28th, 2009, at the Casa Del Popolo, 4873 boul. St. Laurent, Montreal, QC

Free music in exchange for feedback. Listen to three tracks for free. Access fifteen more by REGISTERING and leaving comments.

Project Description:

"Calling the Voice-O-Graph" is my latest full-length album under my artistic moniker "Opositive". The album is available here for free download as a series of high-quality mp3s.
The idea is to create an alternative economy where music is exchanged free of charge for feedback, provided in through of comments left on the website. The first 3 tracks are offered to all site visitors, the other 15 are accessed by registering and leaving comments on tracks heard. Using a website as the principle means of diffusion for the album also has the added bonus of being able to provide very substantial "liner notes" for each track, including the sources for all the samples used. I am also adding text that describes the production process for each track. In so doing, I am going against the grain with much sample-based musical production, wherein one's sources for sample files are often left unacknowledged. But sampling in musical composition is very much akin to academic traditions of quotation within text-based works. This is part of what makes it culturally acceptable (if not always legal in terms of copyright). I consider my sample-based initiatives to be a form of research in the sense of research creation, and protected under the academic exceptions that are a part of the Canadian Copyright Act (Section 29.5). If this is the case, however, then I need to be following traditional standards of academic citation in terms of laying out the specifics of where I have obtained my source material. http://callingthevoiceograph.net provides the platform for this communication, as traditional CD liner notes would not provide enough space for the amount of citations I have prepared, along with the accompanying descriptions of my production process that I fee illuminate the choices I have made as a sample-based producer. The ultimate ambition is to create on online community that begins with sharing and discussing my music, but where visitors are encourage to start contributing their own musical works, videos, etc. These could be remixes or intermedia uses of the tracks I have prepared, or entirely "new" material. Think of it as an online space for alternative media, where productions are diffused and shared freely, but with a strong engagement on the part of producers and audiences.

What is a Voice-O-Graph? It was a device used in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s that enabled users to create short audio recordings of themselves. One spoke into a telephone receiver that then sent a signal to a direct-to-disc recording system housed in the bottom of the booth.

From Wikipedia (so take it for what it's worth…):
"In the past (approximately from the 1940s through the 1970s), there were booths called Voice-O-Graphs, that let the user record their own voice onto a record when money was inserted. These were often found at arcades and tourist attractions alongside other vending and game machines. The Empire State Building's 86th floor observatory in New York City, Coney Island, NY and Conneaut Lake Park, PA are some of the locations which had such machines."

Here's a great photo of Martin Sheen using one in the 1974 movie "Badlands". Although this more "recent" model didn't use a telephone receiver, I gather.

And here's an outrageous, but informative advertising flyer for the device.

And here's an incredible page full of pictures. Hopefully it will stay up on for a long while.

Long Live the Mighty Voice-o-Graph!

Owen Chapman, Oct 28th 2009