Primarily an idiom of powerful pictures set to music, to which spoken texts (of greater or lesser power) are added at the last minute, it incorporates material from widely disparate cultures and reaches across borders much more easily than most text-centered theater.
As a result, both spoken words and the concepts to which spoken words are subordinated have the same significates, namely individual things and their individual properties, such as the tallness of Socrates).
Once the storyteller had invented a set of symbols with which to preserve the spoken word, utterance became not only potentially enduring, but also more complex, to the point of occasionally shaping thought: to this day, I can be unaware of what I think about something until I see it appearing under my hand on paper.
One element of spoken dialogue which we aim to preserve is indirectness.
The "sin" of combining music and the spoken word, which Stravinsky came to regard with such unequivocal abhorrence, is for me an especially tempting one.
The term "optimal efficiency" emerged in this context as a predicted property of the "Cohort Model" of spoken word recognition, which was designed to explain the extreme earliness of word recognition and its sensitivity to contextual constraints (Marslen-Wilson 1975; Marslen-Wilson and Welsh 1978).
The least successful element of Electric Counterpoint is the spoken word material, which shakes down to the predictable fact that dancers are not as sure of themselves as they look.
In fact, "Brooklyn North" features several interrogation scenes in which soft-spoken detectives apply empathy rather than force to elicit the facts.
Over the past few years, Wolf Alice have established a sizeable fanbase thanks to a near-constant stream of singles and EP releases, in which softly-spoken melodies erupt into a clamour of hammering percussion, crashing guitars and siren-like riffs.
By the 19th century the discrepancy between Grabar (which had continued to prevail as the written language) and the spoken language (which had by then splintered into numerous dialects) had grown so vast that a movement arose to elaborate a modern standard language that would be comprehensible to all and fit for use in schools.
