Abstract
This book was published in 2010 the same year that the Turner Prize was given to a sound artist for the first time. It has come out at a time when appreciation for sonic arts, long overdue, is finally on the rise. The Turner prize was given to Susan Philipsz who used her singing voice as an installation piece in several different locations; a concept that some critics might quickly dismiss as simplistic or obvious. However, the human voice has intrinsic complexities and aesthetic qualities that are far from obvious; and this book is a very contemporary look at the aesthetics, uses and implications of the human voice in today’s digital environment.
In the introduction, Norie Neumark, one of the three editors of the book, gives a concise review of the main theorists that have written about the voice and successfully manages to encapsulate their main ideas in short soundbites. She relates those ideas to the material of the book and comments on how they might be taken further within it. She divides this material into three main themes: embodiment, alterity and signification.
The book opens with Theo van Leeuwen’s essay on the ‘Instrumental Representation of the Human Voice’, connecting the voice with musicality, one of the principal concepts that come to mind when thinking about the voice. He makes an interesting word play between the electronic pianos made by Roland and the name of theorist Roland Barthes; and by doing so, he very smartly sets the tone for a book that traces back to the past in order to give a very contemporary account of theories that are continually evolving in today’s digital environment.
In Thomas Y Levin’s ‘Short History of the Voice Mail’, not only are we given a history of the technology, but recent technologies are placed within a wider historical spectrum – wider than we might initially have imagined. I found his essay to be one of the highlights of the book, managing an impressive travel through time from 17th-century China and the ‘thousand mile speaker’, through the acoustic magazine Sonorama of the 1950s (a very interesting and largely unknown predecessor to the podcast), and onwards to the most recent uses of personal computers for telephonic purposes. He manages to aestheticize a piece of technology that is rarely analysed in such terms and he does so very successfully, giving at the same time a very accurate account of its evolution.
An interesting and diverse cast of ‘voices’ appears in the book. Brandon Labelle discusses William Burroughs, in an essay on `Sound Poetry and Live Bodies'. The `hauntology' of Derrida is discussed in Nermin Saybasili's essay on the impact and uses of digital media by immigrants in big cities, as well as on how the voice is used in contemporary artworks with immigration as their theme. And…Winnie the Pooh makes an appearance, in a very well written and refreshingly poetic essay on humming, by anthropologist Michael Taussig.
Neumark offers an essay on ‘Performativity and the Voice’, preparing the ground for an essay by Isabelle Arvers that comes later in the book and is concerned with Machinima, ‘a technique of making films inside virtual realities’ (H Hancock, quoted by Arvers, p. 225). Machinima is a genre largely unknown to the wider public, as it is perhaps to many media theorists; but its inclusion in this book is a perfect example of how it succeeds in taking the raw, speaking and singing voice of our past, to transfer it through telephone wires, radio receivers and cinema screens, on to electronic keyboards, iPods and the internet. Arvers, at the start of her essay, quotes Justin Hall, in what could represent the essence of this book: ‘A videogame is a means by which we learn to control the 21st century’ (p. 225). In the same way, this edited collection brings the concept of the voice into 21st-century media aesthetics and opens up a conversation about the role of sound and its importance in the new media, digital environment. Radio is an area that could perhaps have been given a little more space, since it is still a developing medium and there is a lack of new essays on the radio voice. However, there is an interesting essay by Virginia Madsen and John Potts on ‘The Distribution of the Voice via Podcasting’ that draws upon radio theory.
Indeed this book comes as a breath of fresh air in a field where the sonic element is often forgotten and overshadowed by the image. However, it also adds to a recently growing trend of understanding and shedding light on the acoustic element of mediated aesthetics and, even more importantly, of digital aesthetics. The content of this work ranges from the clearly academic to the poetic, with the two also charmingly merging in some of the essays. The editors have managed to marry the words of academics and artists in a coherent way that gives a vivid account of the current theories on the aesthetics of contemporary digital culture and positions the voice within it in revealing ways.
Given the diversity of the contributors, their style of writing, and the range of subjects covered, this book could appeal to both an academic readership, as well as artists interested in the voice, sonic arts and digital media aesthetics. The academic appeal covers new media as well as traditional media (although admittedly, mainstream media scholars might find the book’s philosophical tone less interesting) and could also be of interest to contemporary arts scholars. Because of the modern tone of the book, one might say that it could also perhaps cross over to the popular culture readership and attract the attention of a non-academic but art loving, technology aware audience.