CODA

The Future of the Voice

2016: The software company Adobe previews VoCo, an “audio manipulator that allows you to
change words in a voiceover simply by typing new words”.a Presented as ‘the Photoshop of the
voice’, VoCo would give users the possibility to create a timbral clone of a voice, and have the
voice recite what they type into the software.b

June 2016: In an interview with Hot97 radio, rapper Wiz Khalifa popularizes the term ‘mumble
rap’, used to describe (often in pejorative terms) an emergent style of rapping distinguished by
barely articulated vocalizations. Pioneered by the likes of Gucci Mane and Chief Keef, it has now
become a standard of Billboard top-charting artists like Young Thug and Future. Today, artists
like Playboi Carti are experimenting with the style and bringing it into new territories. Because
of how popular the style has become, the term is now considered obsolete by rap communities.c

2018: Two films by two African-American directors are released to critical acclaim and box-
office success: BlacKKKlansman, by Spike Lee, and Sorry to Bother You, by Boots Riley. In both,
the black protagonists pose as white on the telephone using ‘white voices’. The voices become
a central narrative device of the respective films. In BlacKKKlansman, the protagonist uses the
‘white voice’ to establish confidence with one of the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan to infiltrate it;
in Sorry to Bother You, the protagonist climbs the corporate ladder of a telemarketing company.

January 12th 2018: The blogger LVPER claims to have identified the rapper behind the Lady Bee
alias in a new post. Lady Bee was a Memphis rapper who released three cult-status tapes in the
mid 1990s. In all of the music the rapper released, they used a pitch shifter to increase their
vocal frequency to sound artificially feminine. Because of this, nobody was able to identify the
rapper’s identity, and particularly their gender, from their voice. Since the tapes were released,
a niche of connoisseurs of the obscure Memphis rap scene have speculated that the voice could
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be tied to legendary rapper Kingpin Skinny Pimp, disguising as a woman to dedicate music to
himself, or of his former wife, a woman named Barbara.d

December 13th 2018: Sound artist Sam Kidel releases Silicon Ear, a new LP featuring the piece
‘Voice Recognition DoS Attack’, in which Kidel “seeks to disable the functionality of voice
recognition software by triggering phonemes”. The piece “exploits a weakness in voice
recognition that cannot distinguish between individual voices. When you speak while the patch
is playing, the cascading shards of human expression mask your speech and thus protect you
from automated surveillance”.e

January 2019: Mohammed Khalifa is apprehended in Syria. Four years earlier, the FBI had
issued an open call seeking help from the public to identify the English-speaking narrator of the
videos of the Islamic State (ISIS). Audio forensics contracted by The New York Times
corroborate that Khalifa is the author of the voiceover. Journalists and radicalization scholars
agree in saying that the influence of his mother tongue English has been incalculable in drawing
into ISIS countless foreign fighters. Khalifa himself claims that an English-narrated YouTube
video had a great impact on him, and convinced him to leave Canada and join the organization.f

March 2019: Danish advertising firm Virtue Nordic, a subsidiary of the Vice Magazine
conglomerate, in collaboration with Copenhagen Pride, launches genderlessvoice.com, a
promotional website for ‘Q’, “the first genderless voice”. ‘Q’ proposes a gender-neutral voice for
future application in VUIs, as an alternative to gendered voices like Siri’s or Alexa’s. ‘Q’ speaks
in a 153 Hz mean frequency, which, as the website informs us, is the “perceived neutral
frequency”.g

May 10th 2019: Musician Holly Herndon releases her third full-length album Proto. The album
sees the participation of SPAWN, a machine learning program developed by Herndon and Mat
Dryhurst, vocally trained to the voices of Herndon and other artists and musicians, including
Jlin, Colin Self, Lyra Prahmuk, Stine Janvin Motland, Jenna Sutela and Martyne Sims, among
others. The ensemble, including SPAWN, would embark on a global tour throughout 2019 and
2020.h Jenna Sutela released nimiia vibié later that year, an EP where she gives voice to a 19th

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century fictional Martian language, as well as bacteria actually found on Mars.i Transgender
musicians Lyra Pramuk would go on to release a solo record in 2020.j

June 12th 2019: LaLiga, the Spanish professional football top division, is fined €250,000. Its app,
which at the time had been downloaded by 4 million people, was found to allow the league to
remotely activate the microphone of the devices on which it was installed. LaLiga was found
guilty of regularly breaching the users’ privacy with the objective of identifying bars where
football matches were screened illegally.k The scandal became the subject of the LP Microphone
Permission by sound artist Jasmine Guffond, released on March 6th 2020.l

August 19th 2019: A clip of Donald Trump reading the book of Genesis is uploaded to YouTube.
It is a ‘deep-fake’: the voice in the video is “entirely computer-generated using a text-to-speech
model trained on the speech patterns” and timbre of Donald Trump.m Over the following
months the same YouTube channel, ‘Vocal Synthesis’, uploads over two hundred videos.
Particularly humorous is Ronald Reagan reading the novella The Call of Cthulhu by H.P.
Lovecraft in its entirety.

July 14th 2020: A post from the Instagram account DietPrada becomes viral. The post gives a
brief account of the story of pop-star Britney Spears and aims to renew attention to the
#FreeBritney movement. Among other more serious accusations, activists of the movement
claim that since her very debut, the pop-star had been required by her label to sing in a much
higher-pitched ‘baby-voice’ than her natural one. Because her real singing voice sounded too
much like Christina Aguilera’s, also a Sony BMG signee, the label retrained her for a higher
range. If the claims were found to be true, the falsetto in which Spears has been singing for
decades must have gravely damaged her vocal folds.n

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