Bodies Reappear as Action

Abstract

What forms of echoic, intersubjective relations can we establish with synthetic voices. How can these affect the production of our own voices? Through a reflection on a series of my own synthetic speech performances, this article considers how notions such as body, presence and action may be associated with the field and practice of voice synthesis and how synthetic voices, as the quintessential disembodied voices, may access the space of bodily co-presence constitutive of the performance event. We haven't yet naturalized voice-based digital assistants, yet the companies that market them are already going to great efforts to bring them into our homes by means of always-on, always-listening devices such as Amazon Echo. Their determination reflects an attempt to make their services seamlessly disappear into the fabric of our quotidian affective interactions. Disappear, here, would mean that when speaking to these devices, we would feel as though we’re interacting with another person as opposed to a computer. Consequently, hearing the sound of these voices would not necessarily remind us of their affiliation. As Amazon's own structure becomes increasingly complex, its voices are built to be more and more 'natural sounding'. Rather than pursuing synthetic voices as naturalistic representations of the human voice, whose value resides in their ability to conceal the processes of their own production, this article seeks to listen to these voice's skewedness and technical genealogies in order to discern how their own material specificity and presence unfold.