Bad Lip Reading, although meant for the mere comical amusement of its listeners, can bring perspective to questions surrounding sound and voice. In these dubbed clips of culturally recognizable events/scenes, we are presented an outlandish rendition which is far what is known to be the true recording. However, as we listen into the recording for long enough, we find that we cannot imagine the characters to be saying anything else. Especially if the video is our first exposure, the combination of visual imagery with this audio lock in this version as somewhat viable. This is due to the fact that linguistically, much of the oral movement we make are similar across varied speech – and therefore, can be easily fabricated.
Through our discussions surrounding Aristotle’s thoughts on sound and voice, we have come to define voice as a utterance, or vibration of the body in which the soul is the catalyst. In this way, the sounds we create in communication not only meaning, but the will, emotion, and intentions of the speaker. The introduction of technology that has made Bad Lip Reading and Lyrebird make us to hypothesize if the “grain” of the voice, as Cavarero defines it, could ever be synthetically manufactured. Could the fervor at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivers a speech or “spunk” in Michael Jackson’s viral songs be replicated? Could “live” footage be dubbed without an audience’s knowledge? Would we welcome such in our society? Our current technological advancements in the audio-visual demand that we look at these questions proactively as a society and draw resultant boundaries
