La Bella Voce e la Macchina
(The Beautiful Voice and the Machine)
A History of Technology and the Expressive Voice

By Perry R. Cook

Written with support from a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship

Table of Contents

1 The Voice: Basic physiology, neurology, and acoustics of the human voice.

2 The Articulated Voice: The motions of our tongue, jaw, etc. that make linguistic communication possible. Gesture in production and perception.

3 The Pitched Voice: Aspects of vocal pitch control and perception, specifically as related to emotion and singing. Plotting of pitch contours. Loudness too.

4 The Visual Voice: Emotion in facial expression, lip reading, visualizations of the vocal organ, and of vocal sound. Spectrograms, hand signs, and much more.

5 The Singing Voice: Singing vs. speech. The basic voice parts. Research and lore about singing.

6 The BioMedical Voice: Surgery as vocal enhancement (Castrati singers), The aging voice. Unintentional and intentional damage to the voice. Stuttering and other disphonias. Artificial larynx's, speech synthesizers, and other therapies and devices to aid the voice.

7 The Noisy Voice: Noise and aperiodicity in the voice, especially singing.

8 The Delayed, Delayed Voice: Acoustic echo and delay. Sonic architecture from cave acoustics through modern concert hall acoustics. Electronic echo and delay, extended versions and variants (delay, reverse echoes, reverberation, artificial chorus, flanging, pitch shifting, much more)

9 The Notated Voice: Speech vs. written language, Musical notation systems, (example: Okinawan shamisan players notate the vocal line as symbols along the image of the shamisan neck), Guidonian hand notation/conducting, Kodaly hand signs.

10 The Broadcast Voice: History and implications of broadcasting.

11 The Microphonic Voice: Megaphones to Microphones: Caruso vs. Bing Crosby.

12 The Recorded Voice: History and vocal implications of sound recording.

13 The Amplified Voice: History and implications of amplifying the voice.

14 The Holy Voice: Praying Devices (rosary beads, prayer wheels and bowls), religious chant, notation, Christian pop and heavy metal bands, etc.

15 The Silent Voice: sometimes saying nothing at all is the most powerful. Vows of silence. Musical rests, pauses, and poetic timing. Recording ?ount-offs?

16 The Anonymous Voice: Paging (air, bus, pilot), Authority, Anonymity, Radio DJs, Commercial announcing, other voices without faces.

17 The Instrumental Voice: Vocalise (songs without words). The voice as percussion instrument, Vocal tablature (notation) for Indian, African drumming. Voice interaction with other instruments (brass and other winds, Digeridoo).

18 The Mechanical Voice: History of speaking/singing machines.

19 The Synthesized Voice: Computer voice synthesis, especially singing synthesis.

20 The Legal Voice: Intellectual property (primarily copyright) related to the voice. Famous historical lawsuits related to the voice. Music downloading. Stealth recording, indy bands.

21 The Fictional Robotic Voice: Voices of machines, robots, and computers in movies, television, etc.

22 The Composed Voice: Contemporary art-music technology and voice composition. Popular music/art technology and the voice.

Other Sections now absorbed into the 22 chapters listed above:

17 The Descriptive Voice: Imitation, Mimicry, etc., Otomonopoea in noise-producing object names, Otomonopoea in musical instrument names.

18 The Gendered Voice: Storytellers taking on other genders, Security/other electronic devices that corrupt gender perception, Artists who use electronics to transform gender.

21 The Accompanied Voice: Figured bass, guitar tablatures, pianos, organs, other stuff.

Appendix A Researching the Voice: Interviews with researchers from Bell Labs, MIT/Lincoln Labs, Haskins Labs, Stockholm KTH, etc., such as Max Mathews, Jont Allen, Ben Gold, Students of Dennis Klatt, Gunnar Fant, Johann Sundberg

Appendix B Composing the Voice: Interviews with John Chowning, Charles Dodge, Paul Lansky, others.

Appendix C Performing the Voice: Interviews with Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, Pamela Z., Bobby McFerrin, others.

Appendix D Switching On the Voice: Interviews with many voice hackers, from Wendy Carlos to Kraftwerk to RadioHead

Appendix E DVDROM: Description of materials on DVDROM