Monday 7 December 2009

9-1 -- 9-4 Transcription (Polly, Emma, Jacob)

Dear all,

we need to confirm our labelling of voices in recording 9-1 -- 9--4.

At present I have labelled the voices in order they initially spoke. 'A' and 'B' for the female students and 'C' for the male student. In my recording (9-3) there seems to be a dominant voice: female 'A', thereby distinguishes her from the other female voice. So how, as group, would we like to label the voices?

P.S: thank you to the students in my recording for speaking so clearly and succinctly; it made my task of transcribing much easier. On the other hand, I'll like to apologise to those who had the task of transcribing (translating) my voice!

P.P.S Has anyone seen Francis Coppola's film, The Conversation? Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert who eavesdrops on a young couple's mid-day tete-a-tete. Though he merely records (rather than transcribes) he becomes obsessed (among other things) with his subject's utterance 'he'd kill us if he had the chance'. It implies that the young couple are engaged in an adulterous affair and the cuckold husband would punished the couple, if not kill them. However, the utterance's meaning is determined by the intonation/emphasis, which Gene Hackman only realises towards the end (exacerbating his already tenuous hold on reality). The utterance with the intonation is 'he'd kill us if he had the chance' implicating the couple with the murder of the cuckold husband. The film, thus, demonstrates the elusiveness of meaning and the attempts we make to anchor meaning to an empirical reality. (Check Antonioni's Blow-up which inspired the film.)