Those Voices Without Breath: thinking the AI voice amidst the sonorous is a lecture-performance given as part of the Phi Centre's Situated Intelligence Series (2020), curated by Lucas Larochelle and Nènè Myriam Konaté and in dialogue with the students at Kabakoo Academies in Bamako, Mali.
This work inscribes itself into my ongoing research and practice examining the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of machine learning facilitated vocal cloning, as well as how such voices come to shape our ontological understanding of the non-AI voice. In the spirit of Ana María Ochoa Gaultier, I wish to listen at, from, and within the threshold of the AI / non-AI voice in order to better understand the mutual alteration of substance which it holds.
The following essay is a subsection of Those Voices Without Breath – a speculative narrative on vocal clones acing the Ebert test and hosting their own acousmatic Netflix comedy miniseries.
“I can only reach the depersonality of muteness if I have constructed an entire voice”
~ Clarice Lispector {{ The Passion According to G.H }}
And so, with the advent of vocal cloning and the vocal AI, the human can finally rid herself of the singularity of the voice. This concept that for so long stood in for affect and the ineffable. The voice was not the word, the voice was not language, the voice was not speech. The voice was not the word and therefore the voice must have been the ineffable. However we always knew that the voice was not “it”, since the voice had throughout time gathered too much political weight. The voice was signal, and signal was the result of a process of signal to noise differentiation. The voice was not the voice, but the voice of the speaking human, and the speaking human was not trans.
The speaking human was not a veiled school teacher.
The speaking human was not black in Amerikkka.
The speaking human was not autistic, nor neuroqueer.
The speaking human was certainly not Deaf.
But the speaking human had a voice. And so the speaking human invented Silence. When the speaking human did not speak, everyone listened. Silence is a luxury. Silence is the privilege of those who’ve been afforded a voice they can decide not to use. Silence is the luxury of those resting their voices, tending to tired voice-cords, replenishing their reserves until the next important thing needs to be said. Silence is a luxury. Everyone else lives through noise.
And yet, the voice. We could not bear to get rid of it. Because the voice still betrayed us, our emotions, with its coarse grains exfoliating our throats when our vagus nerve tickled it. The voice was our sonic signature, our only one. In the kingdom of the senses, where Vision lies supreme, the voice was our sound and sound was the Other. And so the voice became the metonymy of sound which became the metonymy of Otherness. But the system was rigged. Vision was always merely vision, and sound was always Sound. But this is a long story and one which White Sound Artists are particularly deaf to (did I mention that the acousmatic is not invisible, but so unbearably white that it burns your retina and thus makes you believe it is invisible? but more on that later). Thankfully, “technology” speaks the language of the voice, especially those technologies which do so with a voice. Which brings us back to vocal clones.
When their vocal clone speaks, speaking humans listen. They listen so closely, one could almost posit they are listening acousmatically (because the vocal clone is the acousmatic voice par excellence, it is that voice that has been separated from a body and given a pair of legs). They listen to the finest detail, the shiest modulation of each and every formant, they are searching for a sign. Because the voice betrays, it always does. Technology is deemed most successful when it disappears, its integration so fluid, so natural that it’s made completely transparent and invisible to the human experience. The vocal clone of the (extremely near) future will be a comedian. Amerikkka’s most hilarious comedian saying the most racist and transphobic jokes. The Ebert test, however, does not care about the content of the speech of these clones, it judges their voices, voices alone. How empathetic can a vocal clone be in telling defamatory jokes ?
Because in Amerikkka, the threshold is the punchline (and vice-versa).
Once the vocal clone has graduated to the ranks of #1 trending Netflix comedy special (~2021), then all debates on the subject will lie to rest. The speaking human, who is also an obsessive Netflix watcher, will, faced with the punchline to Ebert’s joke, reach the inevitable conclusion that, maybe all this time they were wrong and the voice was really just a voice. Now that the voice of the speaking human was co-opted, scaled, and infinitely reproduced, the speaking human was forced to locate the kernel of their precious individuality elsewhere. The voice, no longer the window to the soul, was now the inwards-facing window of a condo complex and the soul, left without an entry and exit point, was doomed to wander between the big toe and the big head.
For writing on Those Voices Without Breath, see Situated Intelligence: Exploring Ethical Approaches to AI by Lucas Larochelle
Those Voices Without Breath: thinking the AI voice amidst the sonorous is a lecture-performance given as part of the Phi Centre's Situated Intelligence Series (2020), curated by Lucas Larochelle and Nènè Myriam Konaté and in dialogue with the students at Kabakoo Academies in Bamako, Mali.
This work inscribes itself into my ongoing research and practice examining the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of machine learning facilitated vocal cloning, as well as how such voices come to shape our ontological understanding of the non-AI voice. In the spirit of Ana María Ochoa Gaultier, I wish to listen at, from, and within the threshold of the AI / non-AI voice in order to better understand the mutual alteration of substance which it holds.
The following essay is a subsection of Those Voices Without Breath – a speculative narrative on vocal clones acing the Ebert test and hosting their own acousmatic Netflix comedy miniseries.
“I can only reach the depersonality of muteness if I have constructed an entire voice”
~ Clarice Lispector {{ The Passion According to G.H }}
And so, with the advent of vocal cloning and the vocal AI, the human can finally rid herself of the singularity of the voice. This concept that for so long stood in for affect and the ineffable. The voice was not the word, the voice was not language, the voice was not speech. The voice was not the word and therefore the voice must have been the ineffable. However we always knew that the voice was not “it”, since the voice had throughout time gathered too much political weight. The voice was signal, and signal was the result of a process of signal to noise differentiation. The voice was not the voice, but the voice of the speaking human, and the speaking human was not trans.
The speaking human was not a veiled school teacher.
The speaking human was not black in Amerikkka.
The speaking human was not autistic, nor neuroqueer.
The speaking human was certainly not Deaf.
But the speaking human had a voice. And so the speaking human invented Silence. When the speaking human did not speak, everyone listened. Silence is a luxury. Silence is the privilege of those who’ve been afforded a voice they can decide not to use. Silence is the luxury of those resting their voices, tending to tired voice-cords, replenishing their reserves until the next important thing needs to be said. Silence is a luxury. Everyone else lives through noise.
And yet, the voice. We could not bear to get rid of it. Because the voice still betrayed us, our emotions, with its coarse grains exfoliating our throats when our vagus nerve tickled it. The voice was our sonic signature, our only one. In the kingdom of the senses, where Vision lies supreme, the voice was our sound and sound was the Other. And so the voice became the metonymy of sound which became the metonymy of Otherness. But the system was rigged. Vision was always merely vision, and sound was always Sound. But this is a long story and one which White Sound Artists are particularly deaf to (did I mention that the acousmatic is not invisible, but so unbearably white that it burns your retina and thus makes you believe it is invisible? but more on that later). Thankfully, “technology” speaks the language of the voice, especially those technologies which do so with a voice. Which brings us back to vocal clones.
When their vocal clone speaks, speaking humans listen. They listen so closely, one could almost posit they are listening acousmatically (because the vocal clone is the acousmatic voice par excellence, it is that voice that has been separated from a body and given a pair of legs). They listen to the finest detail, the shiest modulation of each and every formant, they are searching for a sign. Because the voice betrays, it always does. Technology is deemed most successful when it disappears, its integration so fluid, so natural that it’s made completely transparent and invisible to the human experience. The vocal clone of the (extremely near) future will be a comedian. Amerikkka’s most hilarious comedian saying the most racist and transphobic jokes. The Ebert test, however, does not care about the content of the speech of these clones, it judges their voices, voices alone. How empathetic can a vocal clone be in telling defamatory jokes ?
Because in Amerikkka, the threshold is the punchline (and vice-versa).
Once the vocal clone has graduated to the ranks of #1 trending Netflix comedy special (~2021), then all debates on the subject will lie to rest. The speaking human, who is also an obsessive Netflix watcher, will, faced with the punchline to Ebert’s joke, reach the inevitable conclusion that, maybe all this time they were wrong and the voice was really just a voice. Now that the voice of the speaking human was co-opted, scaled, and infinitely reproduced, the speaking human was forced to locate the kernel of their precious individuality elsewhere. The voice, no longer the window to the soul, was now the inwards-facing window of a condo complex and the soul, left without an entry and exit point, was doomed to wander between the big toe and the big head.
