Sound poetry is a form of literary or musical composition in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded at the expense of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words". By definition, sound poetry is intended primarily for performance. In general, semantics (from the Greek semantikos, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ... Syntax, originating from the Greek words συν (syn, meaning co- or together) and τάξις (táxis, meaning sequence, order, arrangement), can in linguistics be described as the study of the rules, or patterned relations that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. ... Performance poetry is poetry that is specifically composed for or during performance before an audience. ...

While it is sometimes argued that the roots of sound poetry are to be found in Oral traditions, the writing of pure sound texts that downplay the roles of meaning and structure is a 20th century phenomenon. Early examples include F. T. Marinetti's "Zang Tumb Tumb" (1914) and a piece performed by Hugo Ball in a reading at Cabaret Voltaire in 1915: Hugo Ball (February 22, 1886 - September 14, 1927) was a German author and poet. ... Hugo Ball, with his companion Emmy Hennings, founded Cabaret Voltaire on February 5, 1916 in Zürich as a cabaret for artistic and political purposes. ...

"I created a new species of verse, 'verse without words,' or sound poems....I recited the following:

gadji beri bimba

glandridi lauli lonni cadori..."

(Albright, 2004)

Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate (1921-32, "Primal Sonata") is a particularly well known early example: Kurt Schwitters (June 20, 1887 - January 8, 1948) was a German painter who was born in Hannover, Germany. ...

Listen to a short extract from Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate. (160kb; more info)

The first movement rondo's principal theme being a word, "fmsbwtözäu" pronounced Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu, from a 1918 poem by Raoul Huasmann, apparently also a sound poem. Schwitters also wrote a less well-known sound poem consisting of the sound of the letter W. (Albright, 2004) Info: KCMSound icon from the Reinhardt icon set for KDE Credit: http://www. ... Schwitters Ursonate. ... Rondo, and its French equivalent rondeau, is a word that has been used in music in a number of ways, most often in reference to a musical form, but also in reference to a character-type that is distinct from the form. ... In music, a theme is the initial or primary melody. ...

Later prominent sound poets include Henri Chopin, Bob Cobbing and Ada Verdun Howell. Henri Chopin (born 1922) is an avant-garde poet and musician. ... Bob Cobbing (July 30, 1920 - September 29, 2002) was a British sound, visual, concrete and performance poet who was a central figure in the British Poetry Revival. ... // Ada Verdun Howell b. ...

The poet Edith Sitwell coined the term Abstract poetry to describe some of her own poems which posessed more aural than literary qualities, rendering them essentially meaningless: "The poems in Façade are abstract poems--that is, they are patterns of sound. They are...virtuoso exercises in technique of extreme difficulty, in the same sense as that in which certain studies by Liszt are studies in transcendental technique in music." (Sitwell, 1949) Edith Sitwell (September 7, 1887 – December 9, 1964) was a British poet and critic. ...

Text-sound may be used for sound poems which more closely resemble "fiction or even essays, as traditionally defined, than poetry" ([1]).

See also: Sound art. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...

Sources

• Albright, Daniel (2004). Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226012670.
• Sitwell, Edith (1949). The Canticle of the Rose Poems: 1917-1949, p.xii. New York: Vanguard Press.

External links

• UbuWeb
  • Sound Poetry - A Survey by Steve McCaffery
  • Text Sound Art: A Survey Richard Kostelanetz
  • 10 + 2 = 12 American Text-Sound Pieces "The first major recorded anthology of American sound poetry, edited by Charles Amirkhanian for 1750 Arch Records and released originally in 1974."
• List of sound poets with links to audio files
• Soundpoetry: An online community to write and speak poetically with hardly any restrictions regarding word usage