“In the iconography of the minor story, most sirens do in fact still sing but no longer narrate. Nor do they know everything like their ancient mothers. Sinuous, disheveled and pisciform - as the Homeric monsters were no longer - in addition to their song, they now seduce men for their beauty. The fascination of the voice, made even more disturbing by the absence of words, and the lure of the man to the total pleasure, often openly erotic, still direct the marine scene of seduction. [...] There is a female voice that seduces to death, and has no words.”
Adriana Cavarero, A più voci. Filosofia dell’espressione vocale. Feltrinelli, Milano 2003.
A collaboration with the media artist Anke Schiemann (https://ankeschiemann.de/Motheroid), with the support of Musikfonds e.V. as part of the Neustart Kultur program.
theoretical framework
Manuel García II (1805–1906) has been a widely influential voice teacher. In addition to inventing the laryngoscope, García taught vocal pedagogy at the Paris Conservatory and at London’s Royal Academy of Music. While his work on vocal pedagogy is quite well known even to this day, little has been written or researched about the colonial context in which his research on the physiology of the voice took place. He also took part in the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 where he was able to gain some surgical experience in French military hospitals. In Sounding Bodies Sounding Worlds: An Exploration of Embodiments in Sound, Mickey Vallee proposes the term “laryngealcentric voice” to refer to “the voice brought through technics into the light of science”, whereby “the voice became a knowable object by virtue of its discovery through the technical tools that isolated the voice in the throat”. (i) A colonial epistemology that situated voice and power only in the racial, gendered, and class figure of male white men as human and (ii) a colonial sensory order that insisted on the discretion of sensory experiences, brought the elaboration of the vocal apparatus by scientists and pedagogues in the mid-to-late 19th century. The voice became a technology for asserting colonial difference (Blake 2022). Together with other scientists of his time, he also conducted experiments on dissected organs of animals. In The Philosophy of the Human Voice, James Rush writes: “They [scientists] have removed the organs from men and other animals, and have produced something like their natural voices by blowing through them. They have inspected and named the curious structure of the cartilages and muscles of the larynx, with the absurd purpose to discover thereby the cause of intonation. In short, they have tried to see sound, and to touch it with the dissecting knife. (1827: 4)”. These early attempts at research, dissection and recreation of the vocal apparatus have continued in certain fields of modern technology, especially in the field of AI (of which these synthetic voices are an example) and goes somewhat hand in hand with some ideas within the transhuman and posthuman movement: The elimination of all pain and suffering and the achievement of a perpetual orgasmic state of bliss and happiness through the use of nanotechnology and genetic engineering. While this philosophy can be seen within a positive effort directed toward the elimination of human pain and suffering (and ultimately death as well), on the other hand it does not seem to take into account the complexity of power relationships and the depth of inequality in the neoliberal technical-patriarchal societies. It also fails to consider how this state of perpetual happiness could be shared and made a common good for all individuals and not monopolized by power-holding elites, or weaponised to perpetuate oppression and exploitation.
SHORT DESCRIPTION of the installation
The project consists of an installation for three video and four audio channels, about 15 to 20 minutes long. Human and synthetic voices are used together. The synthetic voices are produced using mainly one dedicated software and some AI-powered voice banks. This kind of software is usually used to create virtual singers that give concerts in the real world in hologram form and have a large fanbase and dedicated subculture. Many voice parameters can be directly manipulated and finely tuned such as vibrato, breathiness, tension, microtonal variations, envelope and even gender to a certain extent. They are mostly female voices, stereotyped, often hypersexualised, always disembodied. I’ll also use tools that can sample any human voice and then make it speak without the need for the person's presence
We asked ourselves these questions at the beginning of the creative process: What face do we imagine when we hear a voice? To what extent do our auditory biases alter our perception and imagination? Behind every human voice there is an actual unique body with unique sound features, timbre, an individual story, emotions, hopes, delusions etc. Also every voice is almost a fingerprint, not generalizable, unique, deep embodied and original. What happens if this very personal voice becomes arbitrarily reproducible by a machine? Are we building a dualistic dystopia populated with voices disaggregated from the vehicle of their expression that is the body?
Blake, I. S. (2022), The vocal apparatus’ colonial contexts. France’s mission civilisatrice and (settler) colonialism in Algeria and North America; in Sonic Histories of Occupation, London: Bloomsbury.
Rush, J. (1827), The Philosophy of the Human Voice: Embracing its Physiological History; Together with a System of Principles by which Criticism in the Art of Elocution May be Rendered Intelligible, and Instruction, Definite and Comprehensive, to which is Added a Brief Analysis of Song and Recitative, Philadelphia, PA: J. Maxwell.
Vallee, M. (2019), Sounding Bodies Sounding Worlds: An Exploration of Embodiments in Sound, Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.
