Spoken word, performance, theater, readings, film dialogue, everyday conversation, interviews, testimony, stories, rap, recitativo, ethnographic documents, political, religious, legal and academic discourse, defense testimony, dance, yoga and gymnastic lessons, military and sports instruction, hypnosis, litany, prayer, ceremonies, television news, editorial, sports, tales, reporting, sales talk, advertising, auctions, vocal synthesizers…The extreme diversity of spoken forms is rarely taken in as a cross-section.

The Encyclopedia of the Spoken Word’s goal is to constitute a compositional plan through which these different forms may be compared. The plan involves the organization of monthly “listening sessions” at which a wide array of sound documents is offered up to listeners by an itinerant group of collectors and assembled live by a DJ or sound artist.

This assembly is created not on the basis of the semantic contents of the documents but according to myriad formal kinships we can find between them: each session is articulated around an aspect of the spoken word (cadence, address, rhythm and timbre, etc.). Each point of entry provides not only a sieve with which collectors can sift through their collections, but also gives listeners a determined point of view on each set.

By creating unnatural hybrids, and revealing micro-connections that transcend categories like discipline and origin, this montage aims to open up an as-of-yet unknown auditory and listening space, offering the possibility, on a mobile basis, to collectively experience a discourse on spoken forms.

At the same time each of these meetings constitutes a listening session opened to all and, in effect, new work toward the completion of an encyclopedia of oral forms.

This three-year project will end in the publication of an object whose format has yet to be defined (text and / or sound). This Encyclopedia of the Spoken Word makes no claim to being scientific nor does it attempt to exhaust sonic, linguistic and discursive elements, or their infinite combinations and assemblies, but as much as any aesthetic object can, it hopes to be an interdisciplinary tool in the service of all practitioners of orality.