on voice

archive of words on voice

[onvoice]

If the female voice, technologically untethered from the material body, has been serenading and seducing the ear since the invention of wax cylinders, why does Silverman insist on a challenge or threat to the patriarchal order in this type of acoustic mirror? The answer depends on our narrow protocols within which women have been permitted to “express” themselves, phonological speaking. As Dolar insists, “singing, by focusing on the voice, actually runs the risk of losing the very thing it tries to worship and revere: it turns it into a fetish object – we could say the highest rampart, the most formidable wall against the voice.” This is why female singers are such affective lightening rods and have historically run the gauntlet of social strictures to remain “ladylike,” even while representing civilisation’s darker, more primal half.

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

[onvoice]

Thus, between the sororal signifiers of the Siren, the swan, and the Swan Maiden, we see just how preoccupied certain traditions have been with discursively regulating the female voice, especially in terms of when it is and is not allowed to “break free” (see Jung Chang’s best-selling memoir, Wild Swans). Bad women cry out and lead men to their doom. Good women cry out only once, and only in martyred celebration of fidelity and obedience (the prerequisites for “grace”). Women not yet on the threshold of death are to be seen and not heard. But – returning to our central problematic – what about women who are heard but not seen?

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

[onvoice]

Adriana Cavarero sees the sirens differently, arguing that their complex depiction in the Homeric source has since been simplified and neutralized in the interest of creating a female stereotype within a didactic moral universe. For in the original tale, “the monstrous singers do not simply emit from their mouths a voice that, like that of the Muse, has a ‘sound of honey’ (which is identified with the very voice of Homer). They sing words, they vocalize stories, they narrate by singing. And they know what they are talking about. Their knowledge is, in fact, total: ‘we know all [idmen],’ they sing.” Moreover the sirens are rendered as frightening bird-like hybrids and are not at all the languid beauties that currently circulate within the popular imagination. WIthin this domesticating metamorphosis “it is feminine song that is at stake.”

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

[onvoice]

These are the cries of the mature human: cries of laughter, cries of sorrow, cries of pain, cries of pleasure. Cognitive and social development depends on being able to distinguish these different types of cries, before the pragmatic matter of responding appropriately. And it is here we first encounter the “acousmatic voice” – the voice with no obvious or visible source – in perhaps its purest form, acting on the “acoustic nerves” of the child.

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

[onvoice]

Silverman quotes Michel Chion, who describes cinema (at least after the advent of sound) as “a machine made in order to deliver a cry from the female voice.” She further notes: “The point of the cry is an unthinkable point at the interior of thought, an inexpressible [point] at the interior of the enunciation, an unrepresentative point at the interior of representation. ...This cry incarnates a fantasy of absolute sonorousness.” As a consequence, provoking a cry from the female larynx is to briefly wrap one’s [male] self in the enigma of inferiority, short-circuiting the filter and censor that mediates between existence and articulation, voice and speech, the viscera and the tongue.

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

[onvoice]

For Silverman – as for Guy Rosolato, from whom she borrows the phrase – the voice is an “acoustic mirror,” upon which the various distortions of narcissistic reflection take place. “Since the voice is capable of being internalized at the same time as it is externalized,” she writes, “it can spill over from subject to object and object to subject, violating the bodily limits upon which classic subjectivity depends, and so smoothing the way for projection and introspection”. This is why Hollywood has been so determined to “synchronize” the female voice with the female body, for fear that it could break free and begin a liberated more accousmatic existence, thereby challenging the disembodied male voice-over for “enunciative authority.” This last “can come to be invested only in a voice which refuses to be subordinated to and judged by the body – a voice that resists the norm of synchronization.” ...Silverman is therefore interested in the ‘migratory potential” of the voice, along with the ongoing cultural “attempt to restrain it within established boundaries, and so to prevent its uncontrolled circulation.”

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

[onvoice]

...the masculinist ear is gratified to provoke a cry from the other, which ostensibly originates in the Real (coded as feminine). This self-flattering conceit (“hear how much she desires me”) depends on the wager that the naked human voice, unclothed by language, provides as organic, mediated guarantee of recognition. If there is such an intense effect (or so goes the narcissistic logic), then there must be an agent involved: “I” must really exist, as a being of cosequence, since another being is expressing pure pleasure, or pain, at my touch.

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

[onvoice]

The voice is a “cool” medium, to invoke Marshal McLuhan’s famous distinction between types of media, providing breathing space within its low-definition information for receivers to “fill in the blanks” for themselves, making the voice more interactive and involving than the body itself. This is why Pythagoras taught behind a curtain – so the students would absorb his lessons more fully, without the diversions of the eye.

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

[onvoice]

Electronic, prerecorded, and synthesized voices are isolated members of a wider planetary chorus that I am mischievously calling “the voice of the world”. The mechanic or cybernetic voice – like the “creaturely” voice of our historical animal companions – traces the invisible but affecting line anew between hailing entity (a radio, for instance) and the interlocutor (who is not necessarily human). And it is the intensity of this relationship, based on acoustic attunement, that reveals sociality itself to be forged through the practice of listening intently to voices that do not neccessarily have human bodies as there source. There is an extra human Eros at work in the vox mundi, seducing “us” into forms of recognizing, heeding, and needing different types of presences, usually reserved for the generic metaphysical Man or human neighbor.

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

[onvoice]

One of the genuine gifts of the film Her is the suggestive sense of the ways in which nonhuman voices might soon have the capacity to seduce us into feeling genuine emotions of intimacy and affection.

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

[onvoice]

...as Steven Connor notes, “Voices are produced by bodies: but can also themselves produce bodies”. That is to say, the voice has an uncanny capacity to “animate” lifeless bodies with a projected vitality, as the ventriloquist’s dummy attests.

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

[onvoice]

...Theodore, who falls in love with “Samantha”, a cutting edge “operating system” that has no visual avatar but communicates by means of an attractively organic-sounding female voice. Theodore’s access to Samantha is afforded purely through the ear. But this, over time, opens up an entire erotic universe for him, one that was previously too often barred by the flesh-and-blood bodies of actual women. ...Theodore becomes hooked on this bodiless love “object” partly because the ear is arguably the most underrated and underexplored erotic organ, connecting directly to the imagination – the phantasmic centre of the libido.

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

[onvoice]

...some of the less proud and precious among us are in fact actively looking forward to the day when we can converse with a computer program in the same way as with a friend or family member (who knows – perhaps they may even listen to what we are saying!)

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

[onvoice]

The voice is ambiguous, ambivalent, and enigmatic. ...The voice seems to be at once inherently human, but also potentially troubling to such a slippery category. The voice in joy, the voice in love, the voice in labor (both work and procreation), the voice in pain, the voice in misery – these intimate yet often impersonal sounds threaten to expose the human being as an animal, a monster, or even an alien. The voice has the disconcerting tendency to detach itself from the body and wander around the place causing mischief, attaching itself to strange entities like parrots or loudspeakers, or even to take a noisy kind of refuge inside our own heads, as with headphones or schizophrenia. In times of distress, we may have trouble syncing up a familiar face with a voice: one of the primal scenes of estrangement, prompting us to be suspicious of the entire world, which cannot reliably synch up the visuals with the soundtrack of our lives,

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

[onvoice]

There are many non linguistic elements in any vocal form of human communication, and these blur the neat distinction between form (voice) and content (speech). “Tone”, for instance, is crucial when it comes to interpreting a spoken missive. ...The medium is the message. And yet the voice is often considered one of the prime instances of unmediated communication (not yet tainted by technologies such as the telephone).

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

[onvoice]

Even as we ignore or disavow the voice of those we choose not to hear, for physically or politically expedient reasons – perhaps not even granting the speaker the status of someone who has a voice – we still celebrate the vocal vector of speech as one of the finest mediums of communication and connection available. Indeed, the voice is the ticket to entrance into the human community, as the laws concerning deaf-mute people made clear until relatively recently (like-wise the Victorian custom of children being seen and not heard).

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

[onvoice]

As such, the human voice is, on the whole, a sonic form of narcissism: a bio cultural artifact in concert with what Giorgio Agamben calls “the anthropological machine” (that is, the all-encompassing apparatus designed to sort the human element from the animal, on the one side, and the machine, on the other).

– Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies