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Berio took a recording of the beginning of Chapter 11 of James Joyce's 'Ulysses' and subjected it to total deconstruction. The text, which is musical in itself, was sliced into phonemes. Berio classified speech sounds (sibilants, plosives, vowels) and edited them into new rhythmic structures.

There are no synthesizers here — the entire complex, almost electronic texture is created exclusively from the human voice of Cathy Berberian. It is a manifesto that speech is already music if one stops listening to the meaning of words and starts listening to their sound.