The People's Microphone technique, first employed by Occupy Wall Street in the 2011udoccupation of Zuccotti Park, is a mode of political speech drawing on the fundamentaludlinguistic/musical principle of imitation. By analyzing musical parameters of the tones ofudvoice in instances of the People's Microphone in protest, and secondly by adapting theudmethod to analyze how the People's Microphone is used in an artwork by BrandonudLaBelle, I lay the speculative groundwork for a transversal theory dealing with theudpolitical influence of musical sound. This theory is extended to Angela Davis, a piece inudPeter Ablinger's Voices and Piano series of compositions for piano and audio recordingudin which the piano exactly imitates the intonations of the voice in different ways. Theudarousal of cognitive dissonance through vocal inflection in interaction with contexts ofudperception is the common thread through several examples that allows a holisticudtheoretical approach across the domains of sound, art and politics. The argumentuddemonstrates how the intrinsic parameters of all vocal sound are both an ever-presentudaesthetic and political force. The second part of the dissertation is an experimentaludcomposition for string quartet wherein unison transformation with smooth as opposed toudstriated movement through the continuum of pitch and rhythmic space (characteristicsudabstracted from unison speech) provide further detailed research into effects ofudconsonance and dissonance, both tonal and cognitive.ud
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