Film Commission Torino Piemonte

What is the voice? Where does it come from? Sound experts, linguists and anthropologists provide a host of different answers to these questions – answers which are often in disagreement with one another. Is it possible to tell the story of a voice?
Demetrio Stratos was born in Egypt to Greek parents. He first came to Italy in the 1960s, he began singing for the Ribelli, the most influential among the beat italiano groups. In the 1970s he co-founded Area, one of Europe's most provocative and experimental pop groups. Beginning with Area’s experimental repertoire, and running parallel to this, Stratos engaged in a study of the voice as a pure musical and sound-producing instrument. His discography includes several voice-only records, while he worked with internationally renowned artists such as John Cage. Research conducted by Stratos remains an important reference for those who study the voice as a musical instrument, while his experimentation is to this day unsurpassed. Stratos’s musical exploration marked a new era in the search for possibilities of the human voice, with verbal language being abandoned as the sole or, at any rate, privileged form of vocal musical expression.