WRI-101: Voice, Noise, Sound, Sense.

The voice is an interesting concept with a wide array of definitions. Dolar wrote an interesting piece titled The Linguistics of The Voice that identified several new aspects of voice. Also, Aristotle in his paper Aristotle On Voice described his definition of voice which is more limited in comparison with Dolar’s. In his essay, Dolar described what he termed ‘a dichotomy of the voice and the signifier’. For instance, “… Voice is what does not contribute to meaning… The signifier possesses a logic, it can be dissected, it can be pinned down and fixed…”(Dolar542). With this distinction Dolar is trying to analyze voice as a non-definable entity that brings about a certain meaning or intent to a listener without actually influencing anything. Meanwhile, the signifier is meant to contribute to the meaning because this concept incorporates the clarity of what is being conveyed.

Furthermore, Aristotle uses voice to encompass a smaller meaning. Aristotle emphasizes that voice is nothing more than the meaning behind what is being said. He writes, “Voice is a kind of sound characteristic of what has soul in it,”(Aristotle669). However, this simplifies voice as nothing more than the mental process behind what is being said. There is not a connection to the physical aspect of voice, instead, that is acknowledged as sound. A sneeze does not have any meaning or mental process behind it and is, thus, not part of a voice. Therefore, Aristotle uses the term voice to explain what Dolar uses the signifier for; the former does not, however, explain what Dolar terms as the voice, which forces us to re-assess our definition for the term.

 

In her piece, Following You, author Kate Crawford discusses different types of listening on social media. The three types are “reciprocal listening, background listening, and delegated listening.” The originally positive “background listening” that Crawford uses to describe the behavior of users on social media in 2009 has become a major negative in 2018—both for the individual and for the community at large. Crawford describes background listening as conversations that “continue as a backdrop throughout the day, with only a few moments requiring concentrated attention.” As social media has become a bigger and bigger milieu for online discussion, background listening has become a dangerous concept for two reasons.

First, as more and more information becomes only available on the internet, people come to rely on the internet as a major source of information. Thus, if people are not giving full attention to the information they are constantly processing, they can transmit the wrong information, sort of like an Arabic telephone. This misunderstanding is one of the major factors that led to the Fake News epidemic which began in 2015. It is much easier to slip in falsities and spread them around if people are only half listening.

Second, something that is a major problem for me, is that, because of social media running in the background, it is difficult to dedicate full attention to other things. Even as I write this blog post, I have flitted back in forth between Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. If I didn’t have these distractions it would be much easier to create a logical, coherent, argumentative  post because I would be giving it my full attention 100% of the time.

 

In Crawford’s piece “Following You: Disciplines of Listening in Social Media” she touches on how “online participation has tended to be conflated with contributing a ‘voice’” (80). This is true in such examples as tweeting your opinions or commenting your thoughts, and I believe still holds true today, in 2018. However, she also discusses the idea about listening and social media. I think this is a concept that has been changed throughout time. To me, I take “listening” to be more of a quiet role and a few years back, in the early 2000s the word for such a person was a “lurker”.  She talks about how linguistically, “lurker” has such negative connotations, but “listener” is more positive. Today in social media, more attention is given to those who “speak out” and therefore have a voice, but I think it is also very important to be a listener. Being a listener and having a voice are actually connected as Crawford writes, “The concept of listening… invokes the more dynamic process of online attention, and suggests that it is an embedded part of network engagement- a necessary corollary to having a ‘voice’” (82). Even if the world is changing to a more “online” sphere focused on social media, the ideas of voice (sound and speaking) and listening are still important to human interaction and are a part of sound studies. As time goes on, change is inevitable, along with more technology, but as Sterne put it, “sound studies today is certainly an intellectual reaction to changes in culture and technology” (SSR, 3). The ideas of sound, listening, speaking, and voice will continue to be important even as social media continues to change our daily lives.

To hear an artificial voice that sounded so similar to mine, while knowing that it was far from my actual articulations, was a strange and even mind boggling experience. These text-to-voice technologies, such as the software developed by Lyrebird, are as fascinating as they are dangerous.

This voice cloning phenomenon poses serious threats to the political world. In a society where “fake news” is so prevalent, technologies that can be the source for forged information can be a consequential danger. The uprise of computerized voices, as talked about in NPR’s article “Can You Believe Your Own Ears?“, makes way for a whole new era of attempting to verify falsified information. With systems like Lyrebird publicly available, it has become increasingly easy to claim that true information is inaccurate and vice versa.

While these technologies pose a great threat to the political world, since it generates a wider range of public information that may not be valid, they are extremely beneficial to the medical field. As talked about in The New York Times’ article, “Helping My Nonverbal Son Find His Voice”, people with diseases such as cerebral palsy can use these text-to-voice programs in order to generate sound, something that they otherwise would never be able to do. This sort of aid is revolutionary, since the toll of losing your ability to have a voice can be detrimental to mental health and development in children.

https://beta.myvoice.lyrebird.ai/g/lls-h0z229

https://beta.myvoice.lyrebird.ai/g/tda4ca6-ac

 

https://beta.myvoice.lyrebird.ai/g/znt8-r6xc7

Bad Lip Reading Clips, while comedic, also makes one feel uneasy. The voice in the video looks like it is coming from the individual when it is understood that the video had been dubbed to make it seem like they are saying comical things. Voice is something personal to the individual, whether one believes in Barthe’s idea of voice coming from “deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilage” of the individual— also known as the grain—or one believes in Aristotle’s idea that voice comes the breath hitting “the soul resident” of the body (Barthes 505, Aristotle 670). It becomes unsettling to hear a computerized robot voice coming from a human’s mouth. The robotic sounding voice leads us to fall into the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley occurs when a humanoid object, which appears almost truly human or strangely familiar to a human, causes observers to feel strange and repulsed. The voice of a computer gives one a very different feeling then when “someone in flesh and bone who emits it” (Cavarero 522). The voice of human is strong but limited. Society has trained people to think, act, and speak in certain ways that are suitable for certain situations, making the bad lip reading live footage clips feel more uncomfortable. However, the cinematic lip reading to Star Wars, including nonhumans and music, makes is easier to watch and trust since one is not listening for the flaws; the setting, often used comedy allows for it because of viewer expectations. While the political stage adds comedic value, it also makes the sound untrustworthy. With sight being very linear and direct, sound is more nebulous; so while the video is easy to trust the words are not, making the viewer second guess the presentation. Overall, while the videos are entertaining, the uncanny value and setting makes the viewer feel uncomfortable. 

     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.

Joe Nero 

 “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.” When this recording of then presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016, America and the world erupted. Many thought Trump’s chances at becoming president were buried solely because of his 2005 comments degrading women. The recording comes from a private conversation with former television personality Billy Bush. While Trump’s career was ultimately not affected negatively because of the tape, Bush lost his job and has a negative tinge on his legacy because of one three minute conversation.

I don’t bring this instance up as an attack against Donald Trump. Rather, the tape exhibits the fact that recordings, videos, pictures, and any other form of digital media spread like wildfire in today’s world, and that what you say or do in front of a camera or microphone can destroy your reputation and possibly even your life. This is where the Lyrebird technology could become extremely lethal in the future. As voice replication technologies grow and improve in the future, discerning one’s true identity will become more sophisticated. American politics, especially in a campaign setting, already thrives off of the degradation of the other candidate(s). Attack ads are commonplace for both sides of every race, many including sound bites from the targeted candidate. With the emergence of voice replication, negative campaigners will become more ruthless in their ad making, and will use the technology to sabotage opposing candidates. Tapes similar to that of Trump will become more and more prevalent, and in a country where the voters already do not trust politicians it will be extremely difficult for candidates to clear their names. Voters will have no real way of knowing what a candidate really said or did. The unfortunate message to those negative campaigners becomes the same that Billy Bush heard from Donald Trump: “You can do anything.” 

As a person who can’t read lips, I’ve always been unsettled with bad lip reading videos, and it’s because as I’m listening to the audio and watching the speaker’s lips, I can’t confidently say that the voice over is fake. It calls into question how reliable our senses are, particularly sight and hearing, and the relationship between those senses.

We’ve always been told that “seeing is believing,” and for some people, that’s led to a confidence in our sense of sight. In fact, if someone were to ask me whether I felt my sight or hearing was more “accurate,” I’d tell them that my sight was. Our ability to see things provides us with something that feels more concrete, something more tangible than soundwaves. But bad lip reading videos take away this sense of concreteness and accuracy. Suddenly what we are “seeing” as a person speaks is not what they are actually saying. The only “truth” is in the fake audio that is playing, and we start to “see” what we are physically hearing, or at least that is true in my case. The more I concentrate on the person’s lips, the more I can convince myself that what I’m hearing is what’s being said. And what makes the experience even more strange is that now we have this voice from a unknown source being put over these clips. The voice overs take listeners out of the context of the clip. Although after talking to Andrew, it seems like the ways this is accomplished is different for live videos versus cinematic footage. In the Star Wars bad lip reading, it was probably much easier to find scenes or clips that fit the song, especially because most of the video consisted of Yoda’s puppet speaking. As for the presidential debate, the person behind these videos most likely had to see what word he/she could fit into Trump’s or Clinton’s mouth.

In a way, bad lip reading makes me think of lyrebird and other forms of artificial voice. While the person behind the dubbing is a real human with a real voice, it is not the voice of the original speaker; it’s taking away what Aristotle saw as one of the distinguishing features we have as humans: our voice. This distortion brings in the long relationship that sound and sight have developed over the years of sound studies.  

In all forms of writing, from academic to artistic, there is a large emphasis placed on the strength of the writer’s “voice,” and that the strength of this voice generally correlates to the quality and power of the writing. From a writer’s voice we interpolate their personality, who they are, what their message is, and what makes them unique, and, in general, we assume the voice and the author are connected: if I’m watching a clip of Bernie Sanders give a speech, I believe that it is Bernie Sanders’ voice coming through my speakers. To frame this in terms of Aristotle’s work, we assume that the “impact of the inbreathed air against the windpipe” is originating from the windpipe of the individual we see is talking. The “Bad Lip Reading” clips play off of that idea by robbing and distorting an individual’s voice while still satisfying the visual component of listening – we can match the words of the voiceover with the movement of the subject’s mouth, their facial expressions, and their gestures. Particularly with the presidential debate editions of BLR, it becomes extremely satisfying and funny to see individuals “say” things that we know they would never say. However, it is not hard to envision this robbing and replacing of the voice (or, the displacement of the origin of the voice from one windpipe to a different windpipe) being used in ways that are disconcerting and dangerous. We are already approaching a point in our society of truth not being truth. What will happen when voice is no longer voice — In other words, when an individual voice can be put in anyone’s mouth?

The Lyrebird team has pioneered text-to-voice technology, specifically with the creation of custom voices users can make based on their own voice, as well as recreation of existing people’s voices such as celebrities or politicians. The technology has obvious and beneficial applications in the fact that it can help people have a voice to use if for some reason they don’t/have lost the ability to speak themselves. Lyrebird in fact has a project dedicated to this very situation that they call “Project Revoice”. “Project Revoice is a non-profit initiative with the ultimate goal to ensure that no one living with ALS will ever have to suffer being robbed of their voice” (Projectrevoice.org). While projects like this clearly seem like a reason this technology will help society, there are ethical issues that can occur with it. The Lyrebird team themselves has an ethics page where they address how they use the technology but if in the wrong hands others may use this technology in a less innocent manner. The ability to copy voices, particularly of people in power is dangerous for obvious reasons. As covered in the article on risks of Lyrebird, conversations could be faked leading to conflict or other issues. At the same time real conversations that may be incriminating can simply be called fake by the people/person being accused.