Cicada Sound Paths:Animal Voice and the Acoustic Ambient in Phoebe Giannisi’s “Tettix”

This article explores the role of animal voice in the acoustic edifice of “Tettix” (“Cicada”), a largescale, multimodal project by contemporary poet-performer, classical philologist, architect, and environmentalist Phoebe Giannisi (Athens, 1964–). It investigates Giannisi’s experimental recreation of the buzzing sound of biological and mythical cicadas across her written poetry, insitu and embodied poetics, and video and installation performance. The core of the article tracks three cicada “sound paths,” each consisting of sonic fragments that pave the way to resignifications of the voice of the insect as a polyphony, which Giannisi orchestrates with reference to the cicadas in Archilochus, Plato, and Japanese poet Basho, as well as Bakhtin’s study of human voice in the modern novel. Giannisi’s sound paths cast light on the cicada’s various polyphonic messages, as well as the scale of her multimodal poetry —specifically the tenor of its acoustic ambient, which combines the insect’s drone-song with other animal and non-animal polyphonies. What is more, these sound paths speak powerfully to Giannisi’s environmentalist vision and activist poetics, in which animal voice and its non-human meaning-making co-exists in “dissonant union” with all earth’s sonorities. In my epilogue, I contend that “Tettix” amounts to a series of “ecopolyphonies” that move well beyond Giannisi’s appeal to Bakhtin. Here, I situate the poet’s ambitious cicada enterprise at the intersections of current research on the vocal vibrancy of the non-human, eco-social relations and biosemiotics, and activist eco-critical theory.