Voices as Relations

Presenter: Jacek Smolicki (Uppsala University, SWE)

Abstract

The emergence of new voice technologies, machine listening techniques, and voice cloning services raises several ethical and political concerns across private and public realms. As voice has historically and cross-culturally been perceived as an expression of the self, deeply situated at the core of being a human being, serious existential challenges arise in this respect too. Where should we search for and locate the self, the beholder of voice, in techno-cultures increasingly populated by computationally generated, disembodied voices?

Rather than seeking the essence of voice as a phenomenon that can be attributed to a single subject, this presentation embarks on a journey to understand voice as inherently a relational event. I suggest that current developments at the intersection of voice and AI do not necessarily jeopardize voice–or at least, they do not only do so–but also remind us that voices are shaped by and embedded within larger, thicker, and temporally extended ecologies.

Therefore, instead of succumbing to the acousmatic aura and eeriness evoked by seemingly disembodied artificial voices, I propose viewing them as components of a larger "acousmatrix": a dense field of relations spanning various subjects, materialities, and histories. Critically inclined artistic practices, as I will argue, can help uncover this intricate mesh of relations while simultaneously pointing toward alternative, more just, and perhaps more hopeful configurations of these dynamics.