The Mechanical Voice

The sound material that will be represented could be in the form of a mechanical voice. I felt that the mechanical voice would embody the suspicion of the attitude of societies mistrust toward the ‘dangers’ of technology. The mechanical voice is alarming to us because it displaces language as a human communicative tool. A relational device from using the idea of the phenomenological ‘I’ speaking from its interior- via an exterior medium to the exterior of another in order, to communicate interior relations to its interior. The mechanical voice speaks from the object of which there is no phenomenological ‘I’ and thus questions the internal mirror of humanity and the self defined presence. Communication begins in the mind- as social activity ultimately from mind to mind. Mechanical objects certainly do not have minds, and therefore, the mechanical voice (as singular representation or sound event) would be borne of nothing! If mechanical objects were able to perceive the phenomenology of ‘I’, learn of its own presence (as a mechanical object), possess human intelligence would prove the mechanical vocal output is borne of an interior. Speech always supplies social and cultural tracing individuality intrinsically enacts and a machine possessing this kind of human intelligence and individuality would point towards either chaos and the lack of a soul, or the (hardly credible notion) that machines could possess a soul. The mechanical voice irrationally evokes the notion that our own humanness ‘could’ be disproved.

By using voices in the performance to be manipulated by the spatial gestures of the generator could be suggest that the generator is conjuring the mechanical voice and emitting them from his or her body, this would be less alarming as the voice would take on the interior of the performer and his or her human characteristics instead of suggesting that mechanical objects have minds, or in a very surreal way the voice invisibly inhabits the space and they are ‘talking’ to the generator and he/she is communicating back.