Voice and the Apparatus of Recording Technology

In light of today's discussion, I was interested by the notion of recording technology and its ability to effect changes in the voice. When Reese mentioned how he hated hearing his own voice in recordings, I understood it as a common anxiety. Somehow, there must be a discrepancy between how people think they should sound and how they actually sound when the voice is disembodied and reflected back to them through an apparatus. What then is the "proper" voice?

Frances Dyson, a feminist media theorist, describes the emergence of the "proper" radio voice in her essay, "The Genealogy of the Radio Voice":

It does not mumble or stutter, it pronounces full and meaningful sentences, it says something. As a voice, it is traditionally male, having a certain timbre and intonation that suggests a belief in what it is saying and a degree of authority in saying it. Critics of the dominant radio voice have dubbed it "the voice of authority". Yet, although this voice appeared with the advent of radio and seems therefore to have sprung from the 20th century, it in fact has been a long time in formation and has accumulated a host of characteristics that connect it to the deepest symbolic and epistemological structures governing thought, speech, and media in western culture. The origins of contemporary production and reception of the voice can be traced to the remote past of western culture, where the guidelines for "proper speech" -- speech which is authoritative, meaningful, gendered as masculine and representative of a particular worldview -- were first set in stone.

Of course, when Barthes speaks of the grain of the voice, he refers specifically to the singing voice. However, in today's media-rich environment, it would be difficult to ignore the effects that media has in the production of our own voices and the anxieties it creates around how we perceive our voices and how we wish to be perceived. In early western thought, the mind became the supreme achievement of human existence, while the body, ever conceived as a machine, presented a problematic knowledge, thus becoming subordinate. In order to properly articulate the mind, the voice had to become disembodied, or de-corporealized, if it was to express a higher knowledge and ascend towards God.

For Plato the naming voice is an "instrument of cosmic synthesis"; for Aristotle the breath required for vocal production is interpreted by Aquinas as an "instrument" of the soul. Such definitions are important in determining the true voice as a voice of the mind, instrumental in the achievement of a higher good, distanced from the alarming presence of the body. Even the breath, the most spiritual aspect of all human corporeality, is eradicated in this system.

Dyson goes on to describe the proper voice of radio as markedly gendered and how women have had to adapt their voices in order to assimilate into a male-dominated system:

It is not difficult to locate the voices excluded from radio. Look to any race, gender or cultural group which poses a threat and listen to their voices on radio. The most consistently excluded or derided voice is feminine. Not only has radio’s mode of direct address developed from oratory, a traditionally masculine pursuit, but radio’s fundamental technology, the microphone, was originally designed for the male vocal range. In fact the radio voice, characterized as masculine, has become so idealized in contemporary culture that feminine voices of authority like Mrs. Thatcher, have had to train their voice to speak in a lower pitch and develop microphone technique in order to be accepted as authoritative by the listening public. Higher pitch is associated with nervousness and a lack of confidence, suggesting that the speaker neither believes in themself nor what they are saying. A rising pitch often produces a shrill voice, and is associated with hysteria and irrationality. These characteristics, among many others, are designated feminine in western culture, and heard as signs of women’s essential lack—both of presence and truth. On radio they are particularly relevant, since it is a medium in which the subject is represented by the voice alone. Thus to be listened to or even heard on radio, women have to adopt the persona (from the Greek, meaning through sound) of the ideal male voice.

So, we see that the history of radio favors what Barthes would perhaps call the "pheno-voice". While the grain of the voice is the site of difference, the voice of authority severs its connection to the body and imposes a single streamlined voice. The apparatus of recording technology also plays an important role in contextualizing a voice in this dominant social sphere. What we hear on the radio may influence how we believe our own voices compare to this standard. The question is, do we affect a change in our voices in order to be well received by a listening audience? To what degree do we subconsciously subscribe to the same standards of proper voice when we know we are being recorded?