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