Writer, sound artist, and composer Miriama Young's Singing the Body Electric makes a call for a timely conversation between the human voice and technology. Narratives on human voice are varied. In musicology, we turn to opera studies, melodrama, and film, which deal with voice and narrativity, disembodied voice, and acousmatic sound. Take Carolyn Abbate's Unsung Voices, Michel Poizat's The Angel's Cry or Michel Chion's The Voice in Cinema.Footnote ¹ Philosophical and literary texts on voice – for instance, Don Ihde's Listening and Voice, Steven Connor's Dumbstruck (and more recently, Beyond Words), Mladen Dolar's A Voice and Nothing More, and Adriana Cavarero's For More than One Voice – discuss the strain of the voice between language and body.Footnote ² Undoubtedly, histories of sound technology are embedded in these discussions. The field of sound studies, thinking sonically and relationally in Jonathan Sterne's words,Footnote ³ looks at the embodiment, mediation, and technology of the voice in its aural environment and material culture. Drawing on this wide literature, Young's book offers a literal and imaginative conversation between varied appearances of voices and varied forms and contexts of technologies. More significantly, portraying the co-existence and cooperation of voice and technology, Young provides a necessary exchange between scholarly knowledge and creative practice.

The book builds on this conversation in two ways. First, it looks at a wide range of examples from Western contemporary art music and popular music, and from literature and film. Some examples include Pierre Henry's electroacoustic composition Variations for a Door and a Sigh (1963), Luciano Berio's electroacoustic composition Thema: Ommagia o Joyce (1958), Pamela Z's interpretation De-Star Spangled Banner (2008), Matmos's album A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure (2001), Radiohead's song ‘Fitter Happier’ (1997), Björk's video ‘All is full of Love’ (1997), August Villiers de L'Isle-Adam futurist novel L’Ève Future (1886) and Spike Jonze's recent film Her (2014). At first, this list might seem exhaustive. However, Young rightfully invites us to hear the resonances, tangible connections, and shared discourses between these examples. Second, the book incorporates ‘etymological and radio interludes’ and interviews with artists and composers into the discussion. These interludes sometimes function as glue between the sections. But often they are interruptions, almost felt like twists and pauses between ideas and examples. Young considers radio interludes ‘an intimate mode of transmission’, (11) and etymological interludes a resource to ‘define meaning and reveal the derivation of terms that pertain to recording technology’ (10). The interviews, which are indicated as voices in between chapters, include Trevor Wishart, Katherine Norman, Paul Lansky, Eduardo Rick Miranda, and Bora Yoon. In so doing, the goal, as she argues, is to avoid one single voice, or the ‘authority’ of the voice (11).

This is perhaps why the theme, voice, is first introduced with a question: What is voice? What is It? (2). Let me italicize it again. I wish to do so not simply to imply a thing-like quality of the voice, but to highlight and second Young's point on the complexity of voice: ‘We may only ever speak around the voice’, writes Mladen Dolar (1).Footnote ⁴ Similarly, and quoting Dolar, Young probes voice within and around the body, language, and technology. She suggests that technology, and voice as technology, can be considered a medium, which enables us to go beyond the dualisms ‘between bodies and machines, between liveness and reproduction, between authenticity and mediation, between inscription and bodily absence, between the “grain” and the “death of the author”’ (6). Electronic modification of voice here provides a needed resource. The question is to what extent and in what forms and contexts electronically modified and aestheticized voice interpenetrates material culture and our everyday sense of voice.

The first chapter directly engages with this question, while looking at how, through the ‘recorded medium’, voice becomes an object to be bought, exchanged, consumed, and ‘privately owned’ (8). The chapter opens with an interlude, with an 1890 recording of Florence Nightingale's voice: ‘When I am no longer even a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate’ (14). As Nightingale wishes, Young attentively listens to the physical dynamics – ‘the grain’ – of her voice and traces a physical body in the recording (15). Recording of the voice problematizes both the life and the death of voice. More so, it allows us to consider the life and death of voice together. That is, recording preserves the voice and implies a presence of the human body on the one hand, and yet leads to a mode of disembodiment and physical absence on the other. The disembodied voice is obviously re-embodied, as we hear the sound, as we give a body to the voice. Recording then reassures that the absence and the presence of voice are both imagined, that is, the experience or hearing of a voice becomes real as much as it is fictitious, as much as it meets another body. Mechanical and synthetic sound contributes to this experience.

Consider Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past, or Allen Weiss's Breathless.Footnote ⁵ Both Sterne and Weiss historically and theoretically reflect on the life and death of recorded voice, while questioning the materiality, plasticity, and temporality of sound technology. Following this line of thought, Young brings our attention to the history of recording technologies, such as auto phonograph, phonograph and telephone, and to acousmatic sound. She discusses the ways in which such technologies habituate forms of hearing and imagine the human presence and body. One example is the cassette, in which we can capture voice in the form of a tangible object. Through similar media, as Young argues, we can also privately own somebody else's voice – here Young's examples are contemporary popular music figures such as Britney Spears and Jay Z. The digital age obviously makes the voices – and the representations of the bodies – ‘shiny, malleable, plastic, tangible’ (32). That is, the ‘plastic bodies’ are seemingly preserved in the recording as well as the ‘electric voices’. Yet, as commodified and circulated, they are also desired, constructed, and shared. One then wonders about the limits of ‘owning’, ‘privately owning’, or belonging to a voice or body, or whether there is such a thing.

Drawing attention to the limits of the physical and cultural mediation of the voice, along with the cuts and irregularities of the body, the second chapter implies this question of ‘owning or belonging to a voice’. The chapter discusses the sampling techniques in musique concrète, experimental music, and popular music. At the heart of the discussion, it reads Jean Paul Sartre's existentialist novel La Nausée, written in 1938. La Nausée depicts a withdrawn historian's contemplation of inanimate objects, his alienation from, yet also fascination with, them. The nausea thus comes to surface as something that the historian cannot perfectly capture or avoid, something that interrupts or perhaps violates his consciousness and existence. It may not be far-fetched to think of that thing as ‘noise’, especially if we recall the etymological roots of noise in the way Michel Serres reminds us in his Genesis.Footnote ⁶ Young refers to La Nausée similarly: the connection that she draws between musique concrète and the novel is telling. Both in Pierre Schaffer's Symphonie pour un Homme Seul (1949–50) and in Pierre Henry's Variations, we hear sounds of inanimate objects, which sound like human sounds. For instance, a door sounds like a sigh in Variations (48). What happens in the novel is precisely this conflation between voice and machine: ‘The voice sings: Some of these days you'll miss me honey … This tiny coughing of the needle’ (50). Coughing of the needle suggests two things: first, the voice of the needle sounds like a glitch, a scratch, an irregularity, both physically and metaphorically; second, the ‘grain’ of the voice, as Young puts it, becomes the recording medium itself. Other examples of the chapter reinforce these points. Take Alvin Lucier's landmark piece I Am Sitting in a Room (1970). As is widely known, Lucier considers his piece a way to ‘smoothen’ his stutter, a speech irregularity. Lucier reads a text, records his speaking – stuttering – voice, plays it back into the room, and re-records the playback until the text and his speaking voice dissolve into the room frequencies. Ironically, the irregularity of speech, the degradation and compression of the recorded voice leads to a decompression and articulates the voice within and as the physical space. As it relates to the unfolding and transformation of the voice, Young also considers the digital context of postproduction techniques. Her next example is an electronic duo, Matmos, and their album A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure. For this album, the duo records the sounds of various medical surgeries and uses these sounds musically by reassembling and remixing them. Without knowing the background of the album, one would not necessarily associate the sounds of the album with these medical procedures. This concept and procedure, however, encourages reflection on the connection between the very visceral sounds and their mediated abstraction. Glitches of the record, cuts of the body, irregularities, and vocal residues of speech then lead to Young's question raised in the third chapter: who is mediating whom? (10).

This question is worthwhile to further the discussion on the interaction between voice and machine. Young's main examples are August Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's futurist novel L’Ève Future (Tomorrow's Eve), Radiohead's song ‘Fitter Happier’ from the album OK Computer, Björk's video ‘All is Full of Love’, and Spike Jonze's movie, Her. These examples encourage consideration of the mimesis between voice and machine, the capacity of electronically modified speech for expression, and the limits of human condition and utterance. Analysing the examples, Young turns to Descartes's early conception of the human body as machine, Deleuze and Guatarri's notion of desiring machine and René Girard's theory on mimesis and desire. The goal is to explore the interactive relation between machine and the human utterance. For instance, to what extent machine speech can express paralinguistic sounds, the nuanced dynamics of the voice (83).

In addition to this question, I wish to ask how machine speech not simply expresses but also informs and constructs the knowledge of the human condition and utterance. How does machine speech change and affect our perception of what humanness is about and what it could be? One needs to engage with Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the desiring machine in more depth here. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari criticize discourses of psychoanalysis – Freud, Klein, and Lacan in particular – for their reading of the unconscious as a symbolic representation of the phallus or the figure of the Father.Footnote ⁷ Rather than reiterating desire as a symptom of the repressed unconscious, lack or symbolic order of language, they argue that desire is a constructive and relational force. Hence the ‘desiring machines’ indicate an interconnected ‘assemblage’, or a network implying the multiplicity of directions. The idea of desiring machines is of course related to Deleuze and Guattari's conception of rhizome and their critical account of schizophrenia not simply as a clinical but also as a cultural condition.

Young refers to this theoretical framework in her analysis of the examples. Take L’Ève Future. In this nineteenth-century science fiction novel, a fictionalized Thomas Edison builds a machine-woman, Hardaly, for his friend Ewald, who is frustrated with his actual fiancée Alicia's limited emotional capacity and lack of individuality. Edison presents Hardaly as an idealized and romanticized android version of Alicia, as a natural and perfect woman. Hence her robotic needs appear human, and perhaps more human than the human. Young draws attention to the parallels between Hardaly and the artificial voice, Samantha, in Jonze's recent movie, Her. Prior to explaining this parallel and its relevance to the musical examples of the chapter, I want to underline the transition that Young suggests: from the irregularity and imperfection of the human body to the perfection and sublimity of the machine that seems natural. This is a significant refrain, which repeats itself in almost all the examples.

Let's begin with Radiohead's ‘Fitter Happier’. The song features a synthesized voice, piano accompaniment, and an atmospheric background. A flat voice speaks: ‘Fitter, happier, more productive. Comfortable. Not drinking too much. Regular exercise at the gym, three days a week. Getting on better with your associate employer and employees. At ease. Eating well: no more microwave dinners or saturated fats. A patient, better driver’ (82). The lyrics, along with the contrast between the musical texture and the flat voice, convey – and mock – a modern discourse of self-advancement and perfection. In effect, the synthesized voice becomes alive and natural, a desiring machine constructing and constructed by the discourse it delivers. Björk's video ‘All is Full of Love’ follows a similar course of mediation. The video depicts how two robots fall in love. As Young posits, ‘Björk's video provokes the viewer to ask whether mechanical beings can feel human characteristics of love, affection and tenderness or merely emulate them’ (85). Adding to this idea and twisting it, I suggest that we also consider whether robots – and robotic voices – can allow us to question and expand on the physical and discursive limits of the human characteristics of love, affection, and tenderness, as well as feeling or emulating them.

This question is very obvious in Jonze's movie, Her. The main character, Theodore, who suffers from heartache and solitude, befriends and falls in love with an artificial female voice, Samantha, generated by an advanced operating system. Samantha's voice is not simply a synthesized voice. It is expressive. It sighs and breathes, knowingly mimicking human affectations. Similar to Hardaly, Samantha is a character with a name and a consciousness, if not with a given body. And likewise, she is the idealized, romanticized, and fantasized woman, who is ‘naturally’ perfect and accessible. Young effectively explains how the character depicted in the film is very much relevant to our everyday encounters with various computerized voices such as Apple's Siri and corporate customer-service voices. ‘The film is so striking because its futuristic, dystopian scenario seems within our reach’, she writes (102). Even though one needs to acknowledge the difference between Siri and Samantha in terms of their capacity for conversation and human affectation, it is true that Samantha speaks through yesterday's future. Her voice is accessible. Yet she is still not perfectly palpable, as her voice states:

Young associates this omnipotence with the ideal perfection and with the ‘creation of an extraordinary, supernatural, or superhuman voice’ by means of sampling technologies (125). Focusing on montage, turntablism, and both digital and analog editing techniques such as sampling, slicing, looping, scratching, and mixing, the following chapter discusses the transformation of voice into a supernatural ‘thing’. Examples include Luciano Berio's Thema: Ommagio a Joyce, performed by Cathy Berberian, Christian Marclay's turntable version of the late Maria Callas, Pamela Z's De-Star Spangled Banner, Janet Jackson and Q-Tip's remix of Joni Mitchell's voice; and Moby's pop appropriation of African-American voices. Given the different contexts of these examples, attribution of the supernatural quality to all of them can be problematic and needs to be revisited. However, Young wants us to consider the medium of recording, de-constructing, and remixing sound as a common ground:

By supernatural and ‘thing-like’ quality, Young indicates here an ‘un-nameable’ state, generated by the techniques mentioned above. In particular, she refers to Roland Barthes and his notion of the grain of the voice ‘as it is inscribed in the media of the recorded object’ (126). The implication is that through the media of the recorded object, the appearance of voice, its context, time, location, source, and designation can be undone, multiplied, and varied. We could still ask, however, why and how we would need to consider this possibility beyond human capacity. Perhaps, thinking of this question and Young's argument side by side, we may instead look at how this possibility – and thing-like quality – can be situated within and around human capacity; that is, how it can inform and expand on the human capacity. Indeed, the last chapter, which is on mobile forms of listening such as telephone and pod listening and listening in small-scale environments such as the private domestic sphere, along with Young's concluding remarks brings the topic from the extraordinary to the ordinary experience of voice as technology and mediation, to the everyday distance yet proximity of the voice, and to the very first question: what is voice, what is it? The book insightfully and imaginatively highlights this critical question by cutting, repeating, scratching, and reassembling it. It indeed sings the body electric through its conversations.