Tag Archives: technology

Voice & Materiality

What is a voice? What are our ideas about the voice and our ways of using the voice? 

Voices are tied to bodies. They convey physicality, emotion, and meaning all together.

The Problem with Bodies (Gregory Whitehead):

Voices also tell us about WHO is speaking. As such, voice is strongly linked to both social and individual identities.

How do we cultivate, develop, and discipline our vocal practices? How do these vocal practices produce ideas about our selves and our identities? What audiences are assumed or produced through such vocal practices?

Voice and Language: “[We] live in a world of others’ words.”

Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated –overpopulated– with the intentions of others. Expropriating I, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process… As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other… The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes one’s “own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language… but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions; it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own (Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p.294)

Voices construct identities. They also play them off against one another. Every speaker has available numerous ways of speaking that are associated with different character types, professions, genders, social statuses, moral stances, age groups, ethnicities, and so on.

Voice & Song: “Knowing all the words did not mean knowing a song. The right words had to be saturated with the sweat and specificity of a particular body, a particular life, and a particular voice.” (Aaron Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working Class Culture, p. 315):

https://youtu.be/R9HKxMgekCo

[See also: Maeve Eberhardt & Kara Freeman on Iggy Azalea.]

 

How do technologies that record, represent, and disseminate the voice transform existing vocal practices or bring about new ones?

Alexander Graham Bell’s Voice

Singing in the Rain:

 

Erin Anderson: Her Husband’s Wife’s Pancreas:

“What happens when a body is gone but a voice remains? What do we make of the some-body who still wants to well up from within it?”

Edison’s Talking Dolls

In “The Sounds Around Us,” by Lawrence English, we learned about Ludwig Koch’s recording of a Common Sharma using a wax cylinder recorder. English describes this as the first “field recording” and says that it is significant in that it represents a transformation of how sound was perceived and remembered.

talkingdollPerhaps surprisingly, the first recordings made and distributed for the purposes of home entertainment were not recordings of music. Instead they were recordings of the voices of little girls reciting nursery rhymes and prayers. These recordings were then inserted into talking dolls and sold as toys. The toy was a flop and quickly disappeared from the market. The few dolls that remain in existence have been mute for some time, as their owners were reluctant to damage the wax cylinders that allowed the dolls to speak by playing them. Researchers recently developed a means for contemporary listeners to hear these voices.

When you listen, you will probably not be surprised that the toy was not successful. However, the dolls are notable in that they were the first instance in which sound recording was envisioned as a way to capture musical performances and to repeat them for entertainment purposes. In doing so, the music recording industry transformed the way in which music was experienced and created.

Read more about the talking dolls and listen to their voices in a New York Times article from May 2015.