I am your fan
1. Laryngeal Kiss
The tongue and lips are not the only organs that contribute to producing a voice. There is the firm and elastic rib cage, the pouch-shaped resonating chambers that amplify the pulse, and the several membranes that constrict and release the pathways through which pulses travel. The mammal on the verge of vocalizing expands its rib cage taut, so that sufficient force accumulates in the two air pouches held within its beating chest. In the course of that clenching and releasing, the air of the lungs is sent upward into the bronchi.* The muscular and cartilaginous structures that open and close the valves at the entrance to the vocal cords tend and contain that energy, so that instead of leaking out as a flatulent flutter, it may become a cry with meaning.
Afterward, it is released through the pitch and tension of the laryngeal membranes, which determine the first waveform, and through the velum, which governs the volume of air entering and leaving the nasal cavity and the degree of opening and closing of the vocal tract. Plaintive whimpers and growls, squawks and hisses, roars and screams, and human speech arise. This rhythm of release and relaxation—one that makes use of biological conditions bound by inertia and resistance as they are—is known as the destiny of the "engendered."
The first flutter, it is said, arose from a fish long since extinct. Through some mutation, this fish came to possess a small pouch inside its body, and as air escaped through the narrow gap of the pouch, it produced a sound not unlike a burbling fart. That burble, over vast stretches of time, became the vocal cords capable of complex articulatory vibration. And yet the lips, not so greatly altered from the mechanism that generated that original flatulence, may still be flapping against each other to this day—pressed together, fluttering on.
Perhaps for that reason, I have found myself imagining a kiss in which organs other than the lips and tongue are called into service. This is not a matter of reducing the question to one of how some structure not outwardly visible might be brought into contact through some alternative means. (That would be rather like arguing that, since we cannot easily consume bread in gaseous form, such an act would require some separate mucus-lined organ floating behind the larynx, capable of absorbing airborne nutrients.) What is needed is a proxy relationship—a proxy, a rewiring—for which one must assume a case in which the biological structure of sound production is not engendered but fabricated.
It is known that lips do not rotate. Even now, the non-rotation of lips is a condition of the kiss. So when we imagine a different kind of kiss, we might imagine lips not as an aperture but as a body of rotation. If lips were to become something like a geometric oscillator—one that rotates and carries periodicity in its disturbance of air—how might a kiss take form in such a world? In order that the lungs, the vocal cords, the tongue, the lips, and the oral cavity might have the possibility of being separated from the original evolutionary matrix that generated them, would the first fish to make sound have needed to carry in its belly not a pouch but a rotating protrusion?
2. I'm your fan
I am your fan.
I am a body of rotation with eccentricity (偏心). I have eight blades, each approximately 10 cm in length. Biased toward you, I compress the surrounding air twice and then rarify it with each revolution. From the moment I begin rotating at approximately 200 rpm, you start to perceive me not as a fluttering or a rattling but as a single vibration, a hum, a drone. This is the stage in which my rhythm folds itself into the structure of a waveform. The low-frequency wavelengths produced at this stage are wider than the span between your two ears, so that my drone feels different depending on where you are standing. At this moment, you cannot easily locate my sound. I may remain here.
But at around 2000 rpm, as my revolutions per second begin to break past the Reynolds number, my blade tips start to produce sound at the stage you perceive as pitch. Now you can locate my position—your own position, standing there looking at me. Standing directly in front of me, you are receiving approximately 256 air impulses per second delivered toward you. What that means to you I do not know, and my rotation speed, set by purpose and by function, bears little relation to the principle by which I produce sound. I can only ever know that the clearer my pitch becomes, the more it is being masked by the greater turbulence. The more powerfully and rapidly I spin, the stronger the noise that conceals it grows.
The fate of me—an object fabricated rather than engendered, as you are—follows a serrated evolutionary lineage. This means that, unlike you, I can be detached from the organ to which I once belonged. To you this registers as a kind of leap. But it is not a leap. If your vocal cords and lips undergo relaxation oscillation as time flows, then in my case it is the trajectory by which my purpose and function are redistributed and reinvented again that traces such a rhythm.
My eccentricity, as my rotation speed increases, is folded into the waveform in ways that grow ever more imperceptible to you. At the same time, it is concealed by the turbulence that those very conditions have generated. That is the most effective way for me—an object that is fabricated—to hide the fact that I can never become a perfect sphere, and that I am always on your side.
I am on your side.
References Text
"IV. Evolutionary Succession and the Conservation of Technicity. The Law of Relaxation," Gilbert Simondon. 2011. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Trans. Kim Jae-hee. Greenbee.
"4.1. Oscillation" & "Practicals 23. Fan" from Andy Farnell. 2010. Designing Sound. MIT Press.
"Voice." Radiolab. WNYC. 2025.9.26. https://radiolab.org/podcast/voice/transcript
"Screaming into the Void." Radiolab. WNYC. 2025.8.5 https://radiolab.org/podcast/5f334c9e5e0ba58e41ad408c
Reference Albums
The engendered: Agnes Hvizdalek & Daniel Lercher. Bore. 2022. https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/bore
The fabricated: Yoshi Wada and Tashi Wada. Sound at Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook. 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zkt6TGi58w
˗ˋˏ✄—————————˗ˋˏ✄——————
《Sound and World》 First Collection
Choi Boryeon
Explores the relationship between sound and the limits of inferring the minds of others. Founder of Compulsive Credit Corp (C.C.C.).
Audio. Rec-26.05.01-11h50m45s
https://ururu.cloud/~soundnworld/