The Bad Lip Reading clips are quite amazing if one realizes the amount of work that must have been put into them. First, the automated voices sound exactly like the actual voices of the people in the clips, especially for the voices of Trump and Yoda. Second, though what is being said is absurd, the lip movement is scarily accurate. In both the live footage and the cinematic footage, the lip reading and automated voice looked valid and there was not much of a difference between the footages. That was the unsettling part; the videos were hilarious, but also showed insight on fake news. While Bad Lip Reading clips are used for comedic purposes not all clips using automated voices will be and some might actually be able to influence politics, especially with the current rise of fake news in social media.
This relates to what we have spent time discussing in class about the uniqueness of someone’s voice. Cavarero discusses this idea in her essay “Multiple Voices”, in which she makes the claim that the essence of someone’s voice is not in what they say but how it sounds. For instance, “… The human condition of uniqueness resounds in the register of the voice” (Cavarero525). Cavarero questions the idea of the voice being an intellectual concept for human uniqueness and, instead, supports the sound of voice as being what makes a human unique. In relation to the Bad Lip Reading clips, Cavarero’s claim is put into question. Now that the ‘uniqueness’ of any voice can be made into an automated copy, is the sound of our voice really unique? These Bad Lip Reading clips suggest that they aren’t as special as Cavarero claims.
