Technology,Embodiment,and Affect in Voice Sciences

Larynx in the Mirror: The Voice Imaged

‘Vocal hygiene’ can be thought of as the care and feeding of the voice. It refers to the things we do to keep the voice healthy. We work on improving how the larynx (voice box) works through voice therapy, but it is also important to take care of the voice by taking care of the body and using the voice well. (Duke Voice Care Center, 2016: 2)

At the Freiburg Institute for Musicians’ Medicine, a teaching, research, and care centre for musicians and their physical well-being, researchers routinely ask singers to perform as they undergo a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan (Echternach, 2016). The resultant anatomical and physiological moving image allows researchers to see precise measurements of the vocal cavity as it produces sound in real time. The most publicized MRI scan is of baritone singer Michael Volle singing Richard Wagner’s ‘Song to the Evening Star’ (Merkur.de, 2016). ²

The Institute’s purpose is to understand the physical habits people need in order to speak in a full and healthy voice, which, they find, includes a relaxed but disciplined full body stance (Gvion, 2016: 156), given that either muscle tension or looseness could deprive a body of the strength required for projection. The visualization of the voice in the MRI is a merging of sound, body, and technological innovations: a new means of preventative medicalization that upholds the conventions of ‘proper articulation’ and a technological witnessing to the intricate structure of muscle tissue. The Institute works towards finding solutions for stage anxiety, assisting with pedagogy and training, and with learning about the potential elasticity of the best voices in the world. ³

The voice, a technology produced through the medium of the body by way of power source (breath), sound source (vocal folds/larynx), and sound modifiers (the vocal tract), is at its healthiest when the body is in its most relaxed state. The more generalizable conclusions drawn from the Freiberg Institute’s research are that a voice’s presence is reliant on a body’s opacity, that the latter should almost entirely disappear for the healthy and idealized voice to enter into the space of listening. And not only does this speak to the singer, but relaxing the body speaks to all walks of life. As Diane Miller writes in her everyday guide to professional voice and communication in the workplace, ‘Relax your breathing before you get to the office by breathing through your nose. Keep your molars slightly apart with your lips closed and place your tongue tip lightly behind your upper and lower front teeth. This will allow the perfect amount of air to come in’ (Miller, 2006: 145). Likewise, Persuasion and Influence for Dummies advises that: ‘A committed voice resonates and conveys strength of character. A weak voice indicates that the speaker’s unsure about what he’s saying. When you’re persuading someone to your point of voice, speak with authority and move with purpose’ (Kuhnke, 2012: 353).

The human voice has long been connected with the body, health, and with the capacity for effective and articulate communication, as well as volition. ⁴ Hippocrates first observed that the human voice resides deep in the body and the trachea, with the air that a body inhales into itself, though he considered the tongue and the lips as doing the work of articulation (Baron and Dedo, 1980). ⁵ Without the tongue, he conceded that there would be no articulation, and without efficient articulation there would be no effective communication. It was crucial for a functioning society that the body be physically able to emit clear sounds. It is with Aristotle that we see the connection between voice as a capacity to express a political community’s values and humans as the ‘animal of the polis’ (quoted in Cavarero, 2005: 184).

It was the invention of the laryngoscope by voice teacher Manuel García in 1853 (Bailey, 1996) that contributed to a new scientific culture around the study of the human voice; along with other inventions such as the stroboscope, the laryngoscope allowed for non-surgical tracheal intubation and inspection. These technologies were invented alongside the medical field of laryngoscopy. García wrote on his discovery:

One September day, in 1854, I was strolling in the Palais Royal, preoccupied with the ever- recurring wish so often repressed as unrealizable, when suddenly I saw the two mirrors of the laryngoscope in their respective positions, as if actually present before my eyes. I went straight to Charrière, the surgical-instrument maker, and asking if he happened to possess a small mirror with a long handle, was informed that he had a little dentist’s mirror, which had been one of the failures of the London Exhibition of 1851. I bought it for 6 francs. Having obtained also a hand mirror, I returned home at once, very impatient to begin my experiments. I placed against the uvula the little mirror (which I had heated in warm water and carefully dried); then, flashing upon its surface with the hand mirror a ray of sunlight, I saw at once, to my great joy, the glottis wide open before me, and so fully exposed, that I could perceive a portion of the trachea. When my excitement had somewhat subsided, I began to examine what was passing before my eyes. The manner in which the glottis silently opened and shut, and moved in the act of phonation, filled me with wonder. (García, 1881: 197–8) ⁶

Stroboscopes, also invented in the mid-1800s, were slow to gain popularity, and were only incorporated into clinical practices in the 1930s, as a means of measuring the regularity in vocal fold vibration (Treole et al., 1999): A strobe light was shone down the patient’s throat, which vibrated at the same rate as healthy vocal folds’ vibration rate. If the series of images were consistent at the rate of the strobe, they were considered healthy. If they varied between images, this indicated a problem. Robert West (1935) explained the imaging procedure:

The room is darkened. The amplifier is adjusted so that the neon tube will flash at the slightest sound made by the subject, but will remain dark when the subject is quiet. The subject then phonates. The observer catches the rays of light from the neon flashes and reflects them into the throat as in ordinary laryngoscopy (García technique). When the observer has caught the bands in the field of view, the subject phonates evenly, while the microphone is moved away from the subject and back to the starting point, the observer watching meanwhile for any appearance of a change of phase. To one skillful in laryngoscopy, the technique is easy. (West, 1935: 456)

Such technologies as the laryngoscope and the stroboscope played important roles in the visual rendering of the voice – taking something virtual and making it actual – in an era where sound, generally speaking, was subject to a range of ‘graphic’ inscriptions (the phonograph and the phonautograph, for instance). ⁷ Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (2012) have emphasized the role of transduction in sound studies as the conversion of one form of energy into another, such as in the case above where the sound energy of vocal folds turns into the light energy of their vibrational capture through a stroboscope. Sound visualization, as we are reminded by Jonathan Sterne (2003), was the predecessor and the prototype of sound reproduction machines, such as the phonograph and the gramophone, which were capable of playing back the sounds etched into the cylinders and discs.

In The Audible Past, Sterne writes that the medical community considered the voice as the uppermost exteriorized sound that leads to diagnosis as well as misdiagnosis, the reasoning for the latter being connected to the voice’s capacity to deceive, as patients could manipulate the voice so as to feign an illness. Nineteenth-century physician Jacob Mendes Da Costa, whose work on traumatized soldiers was foundational to the study of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, expressed disdain for the voice and prescribed methods for circumventing its penchant for twisting truth. Given that, for instance, laryngitis is most easily detectable through the patient’s loss of voice, Da Costa warned of patients who would feign the illness ‘for an indefinite period’, advising the physician to use anaesthetic which would awaken the feigning patient’s ‘nature tone’ by making them ‘scream violently’ (Da Costa, 1876: 195). This provides us with evidence that the alignment of the body with the voice, or the way the voice speaks truth to the body, is in regard to its affective materiality, how one speaks, not what one says.

Voice Lift: The Voice Imagined

Once a procedure reserved for patients with vocal cord paresis, a new cosmetic surgery is being offered to the body interior and exterior: the voice lift is an auxiliary procedure offered to those in the ‘voice industries’, such as performers, singers, lawyers, phone operators, and, probably, lecturers. ⁸ The willing patient has a choice between two procedures: either the surgeon injects implants through the neck that bring the vocal cords closer together, or they inject fat (or collagen) to make the surface area of the flesh thicker. ⁹ The voice lift is increasingly attractive to those who find their voices unwittingly confessing the body’s age. Over time, vocal cords do not sag like skin or pucker like fat. They ossify. Just as cosmetic surgery visually neutralizes the senescence of age (Conrad, 2007: 87), the voice lift secures the body’s internal fountain of youth. Because the body cannot conceal its age if its communicative access to the social is through a husky broken rasp, the truth of the voice lift here is not in the voice’s discourse, but in its affective materiality. The voice lift prevents auditory cues from decay, which would otherwise avow the terrible secrets of the ‘resonant tomb’ (Sterne, 2003: 287) within which it is encased, out of which is resonates, and to which it ultimately returns. Little wonder we connect the voice with the most intimate part of subjectivity, yet acknowledge so readily the voice as an estrangement of the body. Aronson and Bless list the vocal qualities physicians must be ‘on the listen for’ when diagnosing any necessity for vocal interventions, such as when the patient’s voice seems:

asthenic, breathy, choppy, coarse, dull, feeble, flat, gloomy, grating, grave, growling, guttural, harsh, hoarse, hollow, husky, infantile, lifeless, loud, metallic, monotonous, muffled, nasal, neurasthenic, passive, pectoral, pinched, rough, somber, strained, strident, subdued, thick, thin, throaty, tired, toneless, tremulous, tremorous, weak, whining, and whispered. (2011: 3)

Given the alignment of any such qualities with ‘weakness’, the ‘voice lift’ has become very much a part of the beauty industry as a means of making the body’s visual manifestations resonate with its acoustic ones. Since 2004, a marginal number of people with the cash have opted for vocal surgery (Saner, 2012), or voice training to lubricate the vocal folds, making them present enough so as to mask any risk of the body’s age being heard as opposed to seen. The auditory is thereby enlisted as an index of possible ailments in the body, and the voice demarcates a space wherein the visual and the audible are intertwined with one another, as well as with subjectivity and with power. Those people who are living with the calcifying voice that comes with age and/or disease cannot mask it so easily as they might a visible symptom. And in a culture such as ours, where age is falsely tied to weakness, any possibility of covering up so-called weakness is highly valued. ¹⁰

In keeping with the successes of other innovative organ transplants (such as eye transplants and olfactory transplants), a small number of successful larynx transplants have been performed by surgeon teams who work to enclose a new voice apparatus in the patient’s neck. Brenda Jensen, for instance, in 2011, volunteered for the major surgery after she had permanently damaged her larynx over a decade before (Graham-Rowe, 2011). She couldn’t breathe on her own or talk without an electrolarynx. But this is very far from a common surgical intervention.

For most with voice damage, whether neurological or physical or psychological, their communication is delegated to ‘black boxes’: namely the electrolarynx, a vibrating hand-held device the speaker holds to their throat in order to simulate voiced tones. While the device clearly lacks the capacity to produce variation in tone (which is the speech signal of emotion and affect in a voice), it does facilitate clear and lucid interactions between speakers. ¹¹ This technology, however, presents obstacles for tone-based languages such as Mandarin, where tonal inflection produces significant differences in meaning between sounds. There are alternatives such as esophageal speech communication, a laborious process but one that retains tonal inflections and more technical means of transducing subtle inflections, such as Silent Speech Interfaces and other electromyographic-based technologies. ¹²

People who suffer from voice impairments miss more work and cost health care $11 billion per annum in the United States, usually to undergo the voice lift procedure that helps only 60–80 percent of treatment-seekers (Ling et al., 2015: 2). But a new conjuncture in voice repair and restoration is in bioengineered vocal fold mucosa for voice restoration, which involves the bioengineering of vocal fold fibroblasts and epithelial cells grown in organotypic conditions in a laboratory, and tested (1) in vitro, (2) in canine ex vivo (a dead dog’s throat), and (3) in vivo in a humanized mouse, whose human adaptive immune system has tolerated the transplantation (2015: 1). The procedure, which promises a full airway vibratory-to-acoustic output as demonstrated both in vivo and ex vivo, is also less likely to be rejected by the body since the cells from which vocal folds are engineered could be drawn from the patient’s already damaged folds (2015: 3–5). To come to the point, the patient’s voice has a new potential, one that retains the asignifying potential of the voice, and one that makes its return to the body that nurtured its dissolution. Bioengineered vocal fold mucosa, in its calculated estrangement, reunites people with their own potential and their own capacity to ‘give voice’. But it equally represents a new voice intersection between organisms and technology, and human and non-human communications.

Established, well-known, and well-trodden cultural theories of voice and vocalization tend to stop at human utterances. However, Adriano Lameira et al. (2016) have recently demonstrated that an entire human/non-human communication system is lost when we become awash in anthropocentrism. In particular, the field of bioacoustics research has opened up new ways of thinking through human/non-human relations and has revealed possible evolutionary connections to vocalization in primates; volition is at the centre of the discovery. With the advent of high-definition bioacoustics recorders and spectrographic analysis, insights into the voice have developed to the point of drawing linkages between human and primate vocalization. While previous studies tended to fail to find such linkages, the discovery of an orangutan’s utterances of ‘wookies’ (voiced sounds foundational to the production of vowels in human communication) has lent credible evidence to the hypothesis that non-human primates have the potential to volitionally produce ‘grunts’ under tightly controlled circumstances, which exhibit ‘real-time, dynamic and interactive vocal fold control beyond the species-specific repertoire’ (Lameira et al., 2016: 2), and constitute the capacity to signify deep laryngeal control. ¹³

The Voice is an Imaginary Organ

The proposition that the voice is an imaginary organ begins with reference to researchers at the University of Delaware, who are piloting a project of growing vocal folds for close molecular analysis (Kukich, 2016). In previous research, where vocal folds could be seen but not touched, this stage, where they can be grown, touched, and (possibly) implanted, is speaking to a new ‘organological’ stage in voice studies and voice knowledge: in Stiegler’s terms, an organ, organization, technic, and organicism (Wambacq et al., 2016).

The voice is entangled in a complex set of relations with the body, technology, and the social, and is often theorized as an ‘intermediary’, ‘mediator’, or ‘transducer’ between internal and external worlds. It is a well-established perspective that often underlies the ‘floating voices’ that permeate techno-culture, from phonographs to iPhones. It is also a support for the ‘schizophonia’ that was diagnosed by R. Murray Schafer (1993) as the split between sound and source, endemic to modern industrialism and communications technologies. Against such reductionism, Bernard Stiegler’s concept of ‘General Organology’ (2004) offers a unique route to thinking through the conceptual obstacles that the voice raises. General Organology, which encapsulates a theory of individuation/transduction derived from Gilbert Simondon (1989), has three attributes: organs, organizations, and technics. It is the last of this triad that provides us with the most insight on the voice, in the context of this article.

Since, Stiegler claims, physiological organs co-evolve with the technologies that enable their capture and facilitate their understanding, organs are deeply entwined with the social organizations through which knowledge comes to surface as noetic organs, which ‘means: not only organic, not only organizational’ (Stiegler, quoted in Wambacq and Buseyne, 2016: 4). As much as Stiegler’s work is sometimes misinterpreted as a fetish for the technic, the technic accounts for an entanglement between social, technical, and organic milieux that co-emerge in one another’s traces, and it is that emergence that constitutes his Simondon-influenced account of individuation as the becoming of matter into something new. Such a process is what underlies the very conceptual matter of a General Organology as less a method than an approach, which he defends as ‘a way not only of posing questions, but of letting oneself be put into question’ (Stiegler, quoted in Wambacq et al., 2016: 4).

In the context of the ‘voice studies’ turn, which alludes to the bifurcation between voice and body, the voice is taken along a rather unsurprising route of performance and aesthetics (Young, 2015), with predominating views on the subject coming either from pedagogists, musicologists, or performance specialists (see Eidsheim, 2015). The voice studies turn appears, in its detachment from the overly theorized musings of Lacanian or Derridean informed philosophy, to offer a new agency of the subject, which refutes much of the ‘interpellation’ talk endemic to theorizations of voice throughout the 20th century. Contemporary voice studies scholarship looks towards the affective materiality as well as the techno-cultural contexts within which voice is situated and articulated. Voice repair can also work in ways that are less intended to ‘fix’ voice estrangement than to disrupt the ‘naturalness’ of voice embodiment and use the estranged voice as a form of resistance, whereby tone, volume, intensity, resonance, and pitch are radically scrambled so as to defer any ideological attachment we might have to a voice. Such a tactic was famously used by American artist and performer Laurie Anderson, who regularly used prosthetic voice alternating technologies (such as the vocoder) either to multiply her voice into many voices (her piece, ‘Oh Superman’, for instance) or to lower the pitch of her voice to enter into a culturally ascribed masculine register (‘Mach 20’). Anderson’s vocal alterations might be thought of as a critique of the voice image, insofar as she uses technology to evaluate the presupposed values that she embodies, at once a critical and creative gesture. Anderson thus pulls the voice out of the body and purposely displaces it in order to rupture the intersections of identity, subjectivity, and body.

Such vocal ruptures are central to Stiegler’s ‘General Organology’, which approaches every technical and social situation through which a component of human experience (such as the voice) is or can be knowable. General Organology allows us to think about the coming-into-being of individuated substances, like a ‘noetic organ’ such as the voice, but inseparable from the technical or social ties that becoming tends to entail. One of Stiegler’s recent examples is of brain imaging research on children who play video games, which some claim condition the brain to synthesize the capacity for deep attention and hyperattention, and that schools might do best to accommodate this accidental change in cognition, as opposed to stigmatizing the development as a problem (Stiegler, 2010: 74). General Organology centralizes the body as, itself, an evolving concept entwined in prosthetics, organic matter, and ideas, while stressing – in a Deleuze-inspired moment – that ‘prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua human’ (Stiegler, 1996: 152). This process he terms ‘epiphylogenesis’:

a recapitulating, dynamic, morphogenetic (phylogenetic) accumulation of individual experience (epi), designates the appearance of a new relation between the organism and its environment, which is also a new state of matter. If the individual is organic organized matter, then its relation to its environment (to matter in general, organic or inorganic), when it is a question of a who, is mediated by the organized but inorganic matter of the organon, the tool with its instructive role (its role qua instrument), the what. It is in this sense that the what invents the who just as much as it is invented by it.

Namely, the voice is an organ of reproduction, but it is also an organ of production – it is also not an organ at all, but an accumulation of organs (and technologies) that produce a capacity for speaking an individual or collective experience, for ‘giving account of oneself’ (Judith Butler’s [1997] axiom), the uppermost projection of the body’s dynamic capacity for volition in communication. If the voice is claimed to be an ‘in-betweenness’ of internal and external, then that voice purely demarcates this potential through the organic corporeal and inorganic institutional forces that both enable such a capacity and restrict it, and especially if not exclusively the capacity for volition, which is becoming established as a central defining feature in voice studies.

Concluding Remarks

The purpose of this article has been to reconcile the voice as a dynamic site of transduction between embodiment and estrangement, located particularly within its medical and scientific discourses (but not excluding aesthetic, psychological, economic, sociological, or philosophical perspectives). It is indeed exceedingly difficult to talk about what the voice ‘is’ since ‘it’ is ongoing and continually being worked on. And, certainly, technological innovations fully intend to supply the voice with the affective material and immaterial nuances that demarcate the volition of human communication. Silent Speech Interface, which uses cameras to record the imperceptible movements of the surface of the throat and the mouth, which are translated into speech patterns, is one such technology that contributes towards the expanded and expanding sensation of the empirical: visualizing and imagining voice is an ongoing project and projection.

This discussion of voice imaging, of making the voice knowable, offers another way of thinking through the increasingly important role the voice plays in contemporary institutional and extra-institutional politics – with an expanded definition of voice, as an imaginary organ, we might be in a situation where we can ask what it means to give voice to a contemporary social issue, which is itself a postulate of the voice that deserves its own historically grounded investigation. There will always be celebrities with the best voices, those singers who possess something we desire, but so long as we hold them in a superior position over their deviations, we run the risk of excluding a more democratic conceptualization of speaking and of communication. This is why Stiegler’s ‘General Organology’ is so commendable: because it causes us to redefine human bodies as entangled in the technics which facilitate the self-reflexivity of those bodies. And that is why we must push further to explore the estranged configurations of the voice, to generate new frameworks for the voice’s belonging to an expanded sense and sensation of embodiment.