Within the space of twenty years at the end of the nineteenth century, three major new machines of sound reproduction emerged. They developed out of, and brought with them, new ways of thinking about the relationship between body and voice. Through them the voice was distributed, preserved, and diversified. The advent of the talkies in 1927 brought further change, and seemed to reunite body with voice, a process later accelerated by television. Yet despite this renewed intimacy between ear and eye, in little more than 100 years ideas about the voice had undergone a profound metamorphosis. The number and range of voices to which most of us are exposed also multiplied astonishingly in what was becoming a noisy new world. Technology didn’t kill off the voice, as some feared and others believe – in many respects, its importance was enhanced – but the new technologies did help transform it.
Arriving in 1876, between the development of the telegraph and the phonograph, the telephone was in some sense just waiting to be invented. Commonly described as the first technology to disembody the voice1 – to transport someone’s voice without the accompaniment of their body2 – the telephone extended the reach of the ear in an unprecedented way.3
Before its arrival, hearing voices when the speaker wasn’t present was seen as a sign of either mysticism or insanity.4 Now those qualities were projected on to the telephone itself, which seemed like ‘a kind of extra-sensory perception’,5 ‘our sixth-and-a-half sense’.6 So disturbing was the apparent rupture between body and voice that it inspired not just awe and fear, but also contempt. The president of the Western Union turned down the chance to buy Bell’s patents for $100,000, famously saying, ‘What use could this company make of an electrical toy?’,7 and the chief engineer of the British Post Office sneered that the Americans needed phones because they lacked servants. ‘If I want to send a message – I … employ a boy to take it.’8
The newspapers were full of foreboding. ‘It is difficult,’ wrote the Providence Press, ‘to really resist the notion that the powers of darkness are in league with it.’ The Boston Advertiser described a ‘weirdness’ never felt before in the city, while in Scientific American, an anonymous reporter recorded how disorientated the new development made him feel:
My own material existence I am reasonably assured of. I can imagine my friend at the other end of the line. But between us there is an airy nowhere, inhabited by voices and nothing else – Helloland, I should call it. The vocal inhabitants of this strange region have an amazing vanishing quality. Even while you are talking casually to one or another of them, you may become aware that you have been unaccountably ‘cut off’ … The telephone seems to have no visible agency.9
The idea that the voice could be canned, just like beef and milk,10 seemed to denude it of its human quality, transforming it into just another commercial commodity. The voice of the female phone operator was employed to assuage these fears. Although the first commercial switchboard that opened in New Haven, Connecticut in 1878 hired boys, within a decade they’d been almost totally replaced by women, who were seen as more patient, polite, and pliable.11 ‘The dulcet tones of the feminine voice seem to exercise a soothing and calming effect upon the masculine mind, subduing irritation and suggesting gentleness of speech and demeanor; thereby avoiding unnecessary friction.’12 If the telephone made people anxious because it gave alien voices direct access to the listener’s ear, then the employment of women acting as intermediaries between the public and private worlds was seen as an antidote. Brought in to domesticate the telephone, they helped shift it in the public’s mind from technological intruder to a medium through which social contact could be maintained by talk, even if the association of the phone with women soon opened it to male derision.
Today the phone’s ability to connect people’s voices across countries and continents is its most cherished function. As an Australian woman observed, ‘The telephone is more personal than the post. What I want to know is what my friends are feeling, and that I can hear on the phone.’ Another regarded the telephone as ‘the instrument which enables women to build up their psychological neighbourhood’.13
The phone’s spread is easily overstated – eight out of every ten people in the world have never made a phone call, and by 2001 there were more phones in New York than in all of rural Asia.14 It’s also had a contradictory effect on the voice, on the one hand helping to disperse people and so reducing the opportunity for face-to-face speech, and on the other compensating by reconnecting them (an example of how ‘a technological device is eventually used in solving a problem it helped create’).15 While Bell predicted some of its effects – ‘I believe in the future … a man in one part of the country may communicate by word of mouth with another in a different place’16 – he was convinced that its chief function would be for news and entertainment, rather than speech. Indeed in the early days Philadelphia operators would give callers summaries of the news, while in Budapest in 1898 a telephone-newspaper was started up – as if the telephone were simply the radio-in-waiting.
Although the phonograph (precursor of the gramophone) or ‘speaking machine’ arrived only a year after the telephone, in the press at least it was treated almost as its successor. According to the New York Times, ‘The telephone was justly regarded as an ingenious invention when it was first brought before the public, but it is destined to be entirely eclipsed by the new invention of the phonograph. The former transmitted sound. The latter bottles it up for future use.’17
Harper’s Weekly was similarly fickle, extolling the phonograph’s egalitarianism:
The telephone, which created such a sensation a short time ago by demonstrating the possibility of transmitting vocal sounds by telegraph, is now eclipsed by a new wonder called the phonograph. This little instrument records the utterances of the human voice, and like a faithless confidante repeats every secret confided to it whenever requested to do so. It will talk, sing, whistle, cough, sneeze, or perform any other acoustic feat. With charming impartiality it will express itself in the divine strains of a lyric goddess, or use the startling vernacular of a street Arab.18
The phonograph excited not only marvel but also, because of its associations with ghostliness, anxiety. As the press secretary of Thomas Edison, the phonograph’s inventor, wrote, ‘Whoever has spoken into the mouthpiece of the phonograph and whose words are recorded by it has the assurance that his speech may be reproduced audibly in his own tones long after he himself has turned to dust. The possibility is simply startling … Speech has become, as it were, immortal.’19 Slipping from science to seance was all too easy.20
Indeed the phonograph, while it preserved speech, seemed also to possess the power to efface the speaker,21 a classic ingredient of sci-fi horror. Scientific American made it sound almost as though the human voice were being entombed. ‘The voices of … singers … will not die with them, but will remain as long as the metal in which they may be embodied will last.’22
Like the telephone, the phonograph seemed to represent the industrialisation of the voice. The New York Times worried about the demise of reading but also the arrival of ‘bottled orations’,23 while the composer John Philip Sousa feared that the new machine would somehow render the voice redundant, declaring that ‘with the phonograph vocal exercises will be out of vogue! Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?’24
The idea that the new acoustic technologies brought unprecedented changes to the human voice is seductive, but leads all too easily to idealised fantasies of a pre-technological marriage of body and voice.25 It can also give rise to a crude technological determinism: by looking at the telephone and phonograph’s past from the vantage of their future, we make the route between them seem inevitable.
In fact, as we’ve seen, Bell originally thought that the telephone would emit as well as transmit. As for the phonograph, this had two needles at first – one for recording and another for playback. Indeed, because of its poor sound quality, Edison envisaged it mainly as a dictating machine, with its recording function uppermost in his mind. So the eventual path followed by the telephone and phonograph, and the social changes they produced, weren’t foretold by the machines themselves, but were only one among many different tangents they could have taken. Edison even imagined that the phonograph might also be used as a ‘family record’, a kind of phono-album or ‘registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc, by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons’.26 Indeed, of the ten ways in which he thought his invention could ‘benefit mankind’, all but two were concerned with speech and the spoken voice rather than music, and yet the phonograph, and its commercial successor, Emile Berliner’s gramophone (patented in 1887), gained their commercial success – once the early interest in speaking records had subsided – almost entirely from music and the singing voice.
On the other hand, the route eventually followed by the devices wasn’t entirely accidental. Traditional histories of technology often mistake the causes of the new sound-reproduction machines for their effects. Technologies don’t emerge out of nowhere but from the genius of great men: they’re designed by human beings with certain ideas in mind that have evolved from the zeitgeist. As one perceptive cultural historian put it:
Our most cherished pieties about sound-reproductive technologies – for instance, that they separated sounds from their source or that sound recording allows us to hear the voices of the dead – were not and are not innocent empirical descriptions of the technologies’ impact. They were wishes that people grafted onto sound-reproduction technologies – wishes that became programs for innovation and use.27
In fact, many different cultural and economic shifts had helped to shape the new voice-machines, in particular the idea of the voice as a personal attribute, and the development of markets ready to embrace the new products, which itself was made possible by the growth of corporate capitalism, and American households’ emerging sense of private space as they opened themselves up to consumerism.28
Like Bell and Edison before him, Guglielmo Marconi didn’t foresee what would emerge from his patent – in this case the development of broadcasting.29 Radio, like the telephone and phonograph, elicited hope, but also nervousness. While the telephone voice travelled through wires, and the phonograph and gramophone voices were pressed on to foil or cylinders – material forms all – the medium of radio was the vast unbounded ether with its disturbing, uncanny connotations of the supernatural, telepathy, and clairvoyance.30 And whereas the phonograph offered a means of preserving the voice, the radio only emphasised its transience and insubstantiality.31
The BBC was established in 1922, but two years earlier the first commercial radio station, KDKA, had opened in Pittsburgh. Between the 1930s and mid ‘50s, thanks partly to the mass production of cheap radio sets, radio was the dominant mass medium in the United States, with more Americans owning a radio than a telephone or phonograph.32 With the introduction of the telephone, the phonograph and then radio ‘there was a revolution in … [the] aural environment that prompted a major perceptual and cognitive shift, with a new emphasis on hearing’.33 As one commentator in the late 1940s observed, ‘After two decades of radio and sound movies, Americans are becoming more auditory-minded than visual-minded.’34
The spread of radio didn’t only draw attention to the ear, but also brought new styles of speaking into vogue. As we have seen, it marked the beginning of the end of classical oratory: the orotund voice fell out of favour and an anti-oratorical sound became coveted, with the microphone favouring those who didn’t boom into it as if addressing a mass public meeting. Writing about radio in 1936, the psychologist Rudolf Arnheim said that ‘if a man is speaking before others, the most natural thing would be that he should also speak to them … as if they were sitting in front of him and could even answer him’.35
Already by 1933 an innovative BBC talks producer was arguing that the ‘holy voice’, the clerical intonation supposed to carry well in large echoing churches, and the poetry or ‘elocution’ voice, were both unsuited to broadcasting. Radio, she suggested, was bringing a new consciousness of speech, and broadcasters should think about cadence and rhythm:
Why is it that some people, with voices like corncrakes or like sparrows, can hold the breathless attention of a vast audience? These successful voice and personality projectors seem to possess a particular range of personal qualities – they are human, sincere, unaffected and vital … much of the personality is revealed in characteristic cadences, hesitations, stresses, change of pace and general vocal gesture … within the limits of intelligibility, speakers’ idiosyncracies of voice should be left to speak for themselves.36
Yet it would be decades before her aspirations would be realised. In the meantime, radio speech remained mostly the province of men using a ‘voice of authority’ that purported to be the disinterested voice of truth37 but was shaped partly by newsreels like The March of Time. ‘Time Marches On!’38 its narrator, Westbrook Van Voorhis, would thunder (first on radio but from 1935 also in the cinema), his melodramatic delivery and portentous script later parodied by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (‘Then, last week, as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane’). In one way or another, this style of commentary would persist until the 1950s.
In Britain during the 1930s radio was all but closed to working-class people: they were listeners rather than broadcasters. On the rare occasions they were interviewed, the recordings were taken away, transcribed and polished, and later read out from a script by the interviewee – no wonder they sounded so wooden. When, unusually, a group of Durham miners was put in the studio and told to talk unscripted, they swore so liberally that a young studio assistant was dispatched into the studio with a giant sign bearing the words ‘Do Not Say Bloody and Bugger’. This so silenced the men that the assistant had to return to the studio with another sign saying ‘As You Were’.39
Interviews were confined to the studio partly because the recording equipment of the time was so bulky: the arrival of more mobile vans allowed working-class people to be interviewed on their home turf, bringing their accents, rhythms and cadences on to the airwaves.
The Second World War was a war of voices. It was the war that tipped radio into a prominent place in British life. Many Britons first knew that war had been declared, not from reading it in the newspaper (as with previous conflicts), but through hearing the sombre radio announcement of Neville Chamberlain ‘speaking to you from the Cabinet Room of Number 10 Downing Street’. So grimly resonant was his address that most Britons over a certain age (and quite a few below) can still reproduce its intonation and tempo.
Radio comedy programmes like ‘ITMA’ created a kind of audio home front. Listeners came to recognise the characters’ voices – Tommy Handley’s nasal German spy Funf, Dorothy Summers’ mumsy Mrs Mopp – and their catchphrases became enormously reassuring, providing an aural anchor in turbulent times. Whatever else was raging in the world, British listeners knew that they could tune in at eight-thirty on Thursday evenings and be sure to hear Colonel Chinstrap say, ‘I don’t mind if I do,’ the lugubrious Mona Lott declare, ‘It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going,’ Ali Oop repeat, ‘I go – I come back,’ and Mrs Mopp ask, ‘Can I do you now, sir?’40 The audience soon anticipated these catchphrases, felt gratified when they were eventually delivered, and quoted them so liberally that the radio voice became, in a sense, their own.
Radio news was a new phenomenon41 and its style constrained, with the exception of the first eyewitness American broadcast of a major disaster, the crash of the Hindenburg in 1937. When the large German-built Zeppelin aircraft, powered by hydrogen, combusted in New Jersey after its transatlantic flight, reporter Herbert Morrison began to scream, ‘It’s broken into flames! It’s flashing flashing! It’s flashing terrible! … This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world … Oh the humanity and all the passengers!’, adding amid sobs, ‘I’m going to have to stop for a moment because I’ve lost my voice. I can’t talk. This is the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed.’42 Listeners got a vivid sense, through the sound of Morrison overcome with emotion, of being there themselves.43
Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds, based on H. G. Wells’ novel about the invasion of Martians, drew uncannily on the tenor of Morrison’s report. It caused mass panic, but although the naivety of the listeners of the time is often mocked (and nothing dates so much as old radio voices with their clipped articulation), some parts of War of the Worlds remain genuinely disturbing today, especially the reporter’s mounting hysteria in the face of the encroaching horror.44
The audience’s over-reaction partly reflected the enormous credibility that, over a relatively short period, the radio voice had acquired.45 Radio, for Americans, had become a major source of news. Pre-war dispatches from CBC reporters stationed in Europe had made a deep impression on American listeners, who came to trust these voices from over the ocean. Hearing the New York announcer’s voice exhorting the ether with ‘America calling Berlin; come in London’ brought to the radio some of the qualities of the telephone, and made it seem as if the announcer’s voice embodied the city itself.46 The constant breaks in the flow – ‘We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast’ – together with the familiar voices and unexaggerated, conversational style of the reporters (Bob Trout, Ed Murrow, and William Shirer) soon established these programmes as a source of truth.47 So when Welles mimicked those very same conventions – the interrupting of the scheduled live broadcast of dance music, emergency news flashes, horrified eyewitness reports from an intrepid radio reporter in the field – he was mobilising (and simultaneously destroying) all the credibility of the voice of radio news.48
War changed the radio voice in Britain too. At the suggestion of the Minister of Information, anxious that the Germans could easily imitate the voices of upper-class newsreaders, the BBC hired Wilfred Pickles, a popular radio presenter from the North of England, to read the news. To a modern listener Pickles’ vowels bear only faint traces of his northern origins, but the British public was so finely attuned to accent that the merest hint of a flattened vowel on air was enough to cause outrage,49 and Pickles’ appointment launched a heated national debate about accent and dialect.50 As with wartime women announcers, the experiment didn’t last long. Pickles soon returned north, and the ‘BBC voice’ remained the yardstick for broadcasters for two more decades at least.
There were exceptions, like Charles Hill, the Radio Doctor and voice of the wartime Home Front – the first British national broadcaster to demonstrate a real affinity with the audience. Through his colloquial vocabulary and style of address, Hill developed the art of plain speaking.51 Until the Radio Doctor and the Brains Trust programme, ‘serious’ broadcasting had consisted of turgid talks by stentorian speakers, as if the radio talk were simply a lecture, addressed to a mass, but Hill spoke to the audience as a constellation of individuals positioned in families, gathered round the hearth.
Yet once the war had ended, the British radio voice reverted to type, until its deferential style was detonated by The Goon Show. Running from 1951 to 1960, this slapstick comedy series not only blew a raspberry at sobriety but also introduced a style of clowning and cartoon radio never heard on the air before. The Goons parodied the class-streaked British voices of the day, from the posh cad to the cockney idiot, and created an extraordinary profusion of vocal sounds – a falsetto giggle, the deep-voiced Miss Throat, unaccountable Indian accents. Endlessly imitated, these character voices entered the public’s own conversations, bringing a new acoustic into British social speech. It was the nearest Britain had come to the Marx brothers, or the aural style of Eddie Cantor’s 1930s’ American radio shows, or George Burns and Gracie Allen.52
The slow death of the BBC voice was also helped by the birth of British pirate-radio stations in 1964, speaking in a tone and language that young people wanted to use themselves. The DJ John Peel recalled:
When I started doing radio programmes on a pirate ship in 1967 … one of the things that was seen as astonishing – and the same thing was true when Radio I started – was that I used to speak in what was then my normal voice, and I didn’t have one of those mid-Atlantic, ‘Hi there, great to see you, the John Peel Show’ [voices] which is what everybody seemed to be doing. Just using my ordinary voice was seen as rather exciting.53
Peel’s voice, with its low, uninflected, and apparently working-class Liverpudlian burr, became one of his distinguishing features (even if he was actually the product of the British public-school system and had deliberately roughened his accent).54
The BBC responded to the pirates by establishing its own pop-music network, Radio 1 , in 1967. Never before had so many people sounded so cheerful for so long, or displayed such ‘pseudo-proletarian spontaneity’,55 the relentless mateyness spoofed twenty-five years later by Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse’s bland, glib, ageing DJs, ‘Smashie and Nicey’.
A new audio world was emerging. Phone-ins, making their British debut in 1968 on BBC Radio Nottingham, and on national radio two years later, provided an unprecedented opportunity for the voice of the ordinary person to be heard – not exactly unmediated, for presenters still had the power to question and interrupt them, but at least spontaneously on air. As one phone-in presenter put it, ‘Today there is nothing special about hearing the voice of the public on the radio … [people] like to hear fellow human beings talking, even if the talk is a load of rubbish.’56
The truly upper-class voice, once de rigueur for broadcasting, would eventually fall completely out of favour. Patricia Hughes, the announcer whose crisp, ringing tones had been the very embodiment of BBC Radio 3 in the era of ‘elocution’, lamented her eclipse: ‘I’ve got a voice that nobody wants.’57 Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow says his original voice now embarrasses him, so much has his accent changed. ‘I can’t believe that I ever spoke like that … People who sound like public-school toffs would have a great deal of difficulty in journalism now.’58 Snow didn’t deliberately demoticise his accent – it just developed out of the new culture of broadcasting.
Yet despite the diversity of voices to be heard on local radio, networked BBC radio still hasn’t a single newsreader with a regional accent. In America the TV news anchor Dan Rather recalls that, when he started in broadcasting, he tried to reduce his Texan accent because, ‘I was told, “The Midwestern accent is the least identifiable accent and the most acceptable.” Until, deep in the 1950s, you did hear regional accents on radio and television [but] some time in the late 1950s, beginning and early ‘60s … the pasteurisation or homogenisation of voices that you’ve begun to hear happened.59
If the phone-in brought the voices of ordinary listeners on to the airwaves, it did so on the professionals’ terms. Callers-in were still subject to an editorial selection process, and had to conform to producers’ ideas of what counted as fluent and articulate. Speakers who were marginalised or ignored by the mainstream media turned instead to community radio, often described as giving a voice to the voiceless. But community radio did this literally as well, by using non-professional broadcasters from a wide range of backgrounds, whose voices skipped to a tune very different from those on commercial or even public stations. On community radio you could hear languages, dialects and accents that were almost entirely absent from network radio. KPFA, established in Berkeley, California in 1949, was the first in the world to be financed by subscriptions from listeners.60 Over fifty years later, its voices still startle, some sounding so low-key and making so few concessions to broadcasting that listening becomes a form of eavesdropping. The explosion of ‘free radio’ in the 1970s bridged the gap between the radio voice and the off-air one. In the Kwa language of Yoruba, there are two words for radio: ‘ghohun-gbohun’ (snatcher of voices), and ‘a-s’oro ma gb’esi’ (that which speaks without pausing for reply).61 To these features of broadcasting community radio provided a radical alternative.
Al Jolson was mobbed outside the Warner Theatre on Broadway and 52nd Street after The Jazz Singer premiered on 6 October 1927.62 Silent screen stars, thereafter, were required for the first time to take a voice test. One actor recalled a door bursting open and a man running out yelling, ‘Wallace Beery has a voice! Wallace Beery has a voice!’63 When she heard her voice test played back, Jean Arthur cried out in dismay, ‘A foghorn!’64 When Mary Pickford heard hers, she was horrified. ‘That’s a pipsqueak voice. It’s impossible. I sound like I’m twelve or thirteen. Oh, it’s horrible.’65 (The clumsiness of the early, non-directional mikes didn’t help. Pickford had what Douglas Fairbanks Jr. called a ‘small, tight voice’, one that needed caressing by a microphone close to her. Instead, she was required to strain her voice to reach one far away.66)
The careers of silent movie stars were now on the line. When Clara Bow, who became Paramount’s most prominent casualty,67 saw her test, she screamed, ‘How can I play … with a voice like that?’ She was ‘stunned and helpless’, recalled Louise Brooks. ‘She already knew that she was finished.’
Even a star as big as Garbo had to take a sound test, and was nervous. ‘I feel like an unborn child,’ she told a friend beforehand. The studios were concerned, not about her timbre but her Swedish accent. ‘Garbo Talks!’ proclaimed the eventual publicity for Anna Christie (1930), her first talkie, as if she’d been silent before then, off the screen as well as on. When, thirty-four minutes in, she finally spoke her first words, ‘Give me a whisky … ginger ale on the side … and don’t be stingy, baby,’ audiences cheered, and critics compared her voice to wine, velvet, a cello, mahogany.68
Not everyone was so fortunate. Suddenly every vocal blemish mattered: even Stan Laurel became concerned about his childhood lisp. Voice coaches were now in demand. Sound-men became the new Hollywood aristocracy. ‘Esther, see that man up there in the booth?’ Richard Dix asked Esther Ralston when they were filming The Wheel of Life in 1929. ‘You mean the soundman?’ ‘Yes, and you’d better be nice to him.’ ‘Oh. Why?’ ‘Because he can make a baritone out of you and a soprano out of me.’69
But what was important was not so much a perfect voice as one that matched the actor’s already established screen personality. The most infamous mismatch belonged to John Gilbert, and the discrepancy killed off his career. Those who’d worked with Gilbert before had never thought that his light baritone voice was particularly high-pitched, although it was breathy, nasal and lacking in chest tones. It was a voice that might have fitted Gary Cooper or David Niven but not Gilbert’s swashbuckling image: his once admired love scenes now seemed comic and made audiences laugh. When the cinema had been silent, the public could project its own vocal fantasies, based on the actor’s appearance, on to the stars:70 radio and silent cinema both allowed the public to ‘dream of the harmony of the whole’.71 Once sound was introduced they were often disappointed. Within a few years Gilbert’s confidence was shattered and he drank himself to death. As an MGM production manager later said, ‘It was a miscarriage of justice. Today, his voice problem would have been rectified in five minutes.’72
Yet once the novelty of cinema sound wore off it became, in a sense, inaudible. Critics concentrated on the visual image, rarely referring to the soundtrack (which anyway described music and effects more than voice), except as an afterthought, something added to the visual image rather than its equal partner.73 Theorists, with a few notable exceptions, deconstructed ‘the male gaze’ but paid very little attention to the dominance of the male voice.74 The voice was treated as a natural, unmediated aspect of film as compared with the artfulness of the image. Movie credits themselves expressed the industry’s hierarchy – in some of them (Master and Commander, for instance) still, the sound designer’s name comes after that of the hairstylist.
It wasn’t until 1980 that the status of the voice in the Hollywood soundtrack began to be debated,75 and even then there was a tendency to idealise the cinema voice as somehow purer than the image,76 even though it was always recorded from a particular point of space or field, and given artificial priority over other sounds.77 American movies, for instance, usually put each speaking character on a separate soundtrack, in a kind of auditory close-up78. One analyst has talked of ‘the sound film’s fundamental lie: the implication that the sound is produced by the image when in fact it remains independent of it’.79 When Jean-Luc Godard put an omni-directional mike in a French cafe and picked up all the sounds equally without giving special hierarchical place to voice, it was not only strange and shocking but also revealed just what a sonic fiction Hollywood sound had created.80 With its layering of 24-tracks and overlapping dialogue, Robert Altman’s 1975 Nashville, too, made the vocal conventions of most Hollywood movies seem absurdly thin and artificial.81
Since then, Hollywood has entered multi-track nirvana, with voices perfectible through a multitude of post-production techniques, including Dolby sound, computerised mixing, and digital formats. In amongst all the consummate sounds, the juice of the voice no longer bubbles through as it once did. Audio has become over-processed.
Yet in one respect the voice has become more important to American film: major stars are now brought in to voice-animation movies. They’re cast, curiously, not just for their vocal image but also for their visual one, with the characters’ faces recognisable cartoon versions of the stars’ own. Watching a cartoon today, the viewer calls up their memory of the star’s features, and reunites the actor’s body with the voice.
One voice teacher believes that voice has actually declined in importance in American cinema. ‘There’s been a big shift. Most Americans can do vocal impressions of the great stars of the Hollywood studio era. Everybody can do an impression of Jimmy Stewart or Bette Davis or Katherine Hepburn, but I defy anyone to do their impression of Brad Pitt’s voice or Ben Affleck’s voice,’82 although today’s film actors might just be more vocally versatile and less mannered than their predecessors. With such vocal homogeneity, it’s the character roles where the flashy vocal technique is to be found – Meryl Streep’s (sometimes self-conscious) versatility with accent; Brando’s much-imitated rasping Don Corleone voice for The Godfather (1972)83; and Mercedes McCambridge’s voice of the demon inside Linda Blair in The Exorcist (1973).84
Once voice and body had been severed so dramatically through the silent film, there was always some anxiety about how well they could be sutured back together. Techniques like post-synchronisation raised the possibility that strange, alien voices might be substituted for an actor’s real one.85 Voice-overs posed the unsettling question of where the speaker was actually situated – beyond the screen, in the cinema, or perhaps in some altogether fictional space, which itself disturbed the assumption that talking cinema had restored body and voice.86 The arrival of sound also introduced the vexed question of language. Just as children, once they start to speak, lose some of the Esperanto of nonverbal communication and become confined like most adults to their own language community, so too did film, once sound was added, lose its claim to universality, its ability to cross language frontiers with ease. What’s more, when sound came, as a British observer found, ‘a problem of accent and class … appeared immediately’.87 The practice of dubbing films threw up more questions. Dubbing seems to remove from film what the talkies ‘returned’, and for this reason, perhaps, has produced heated discussion over the years. Dubbing certainly alters the relationship between film and the voice, and also the rhythm and tempo of the film’s original language.
Some stars have been dubbed by different actors in the same country (Brando had ten different Spanish doubles, Connery a dozen), while others are always dubbed by the same foreign voice-over actors, in order to preserve a sense of ‘authenticity’ in the voice.88 Curious situations follow from this practice. An Italian would be shocked to hear Laurence Olivier’s ‘true’ voice – to him it will always be Gino Cervi’s that attaches itself to Olivier’s face and body. Similarly an Italian woman, hearing Marlon Brando speak for the first time, was disappointed and even saddened by how ‘unbeautiful’ his voice sounded. ‘He would never have been a successful actor in Italy with that voice,’ she said.89 The voices of both Robert De Niro and Al Pacino were dubbed by the same Italian actor for a number of years until the two stars met on the set of Heat in 1995, when another actor had to substitute for one of them. This was deeply disturbing to Italian audiences, who felt there was something wrong with Pacino’s voice because it wasn’t what they were used to hearing.90 The dubbed voice had become more authentic than the actor’s own.
Anyone dubbing Tom Cruise into another language has to sign an agreement that they won’t be photographed in a compromising position,91 as if they were not simply re-voicing the star but also in some way becoming him, or his surrogate, or perhaps just his representative in another country, entrusted with the loan of his charisma, and obliged to keep it safe. Even in the talkies, the voice could be dismembered or appropriated.
The arrival of television seemed like a rebuke to the voice – a declaration that radio, with only the oral at its disposal, was inadequate.92 The differences between the two media were shown up dramatically by the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates, the first ever to be televised. Those who heard the debate on radio pronounced Nixon the winner. The seventy million television viewers, though, saw an underweight, pale Nixon debating with a rested, tanned, and confident Kennedy, and overwhelmingly judged Kennedy winner of the first debate.93
Unlike the cinema, live television enabled an audience to see a speaker at the very moment of speaking, seeming to serve as some kind of guarantee of authenticity. But as the medium developed, it was clear that the relationship between the mass-mediated body and voice was far more complex. Television came to be indicted of all kinds of crimes against the voice – of making everyone sound the same,94 of damaging children’s listening skills and attention span, of killing off quality public speaking. The research on all these accusations isn’t conclusive, although it’s hard to believe that hearing so much speech from an electronic medium that doesn’t hear you back is without consequences.
At the same time the sheer number of different speakers and voices that the public has been exposed to through television has made its impact on vocal style. It has certainly played a part in the death of deferential speech, which is also reflected in volume. Big Brother participants not only talk at high volume, but also are encouraged to say whatever comes to mind.
TV advertisements, too, have impacted upon the voice, as well as echoing broader social changes.95 The booming ‘announcer’s voice’ and the ‘dark-brown’ voice – a deep, smooth voice that makes every product sound like a sexual aid – have given way to a voice of the street. The advertising voice of today is more likely to be laid-back, and belong to a celebrity (no stigma about commercials any more), or a stand-up comedian. ‘Why have we ditched the voice of God? It’s partly generational. Younger consumers aren’t eager to be ordered around by a stern baritone. Rather than obeying an authoritative voice, they look to the voice of a friend for guidance. Thus, all the pros stress how they can do “next-door neighbour” and “real person” and “quirky best friend”.96
If television was held responsible for eroding vocal skills, it was soon joined in the dock by the computer. But what began as a medium with more in common with the book than the voice soon came to add acoustic elements and even, in voice telephony, promised to turn into a substitute for the phone itself.97 Although sceptics doubted that it would ever really transform itself into a proper aural medium, it soon became clear that, shockingly easily, people could be nudged into reacting to computers as if they were humans.98 Hal, the intelligent talking computer with a personality in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is no longer science fiction.
At an international conference in Austria the keynote speaker is using PowerPoint. He brings up the first slide which includes, among other things, a joke. While he’s speaking the audience is listening but also scanning the slide so that we reach the joke before he arrives at the stage in his presentation where he’s actually going to deliver it. A suppressed titter passes round the hall – suppressed because the joke will only formally exist once he’s voiced it.
But here’s the dilemma. In a few seconds, he’ll be saying the joke out loud, and how then should we react? Do we repeat our titter, only mildly, to acknowledge the fact that we’ve already read the joke ourselves? Or should we simulate exuberant laughter, as if it were fresh to us? In the event, roughly half the hall opts for the mild titter while the other half gives a good impersonation of authentic hilarity. Simply by using a visual aid, the speaker has changed our relationship to his voice, decentring and demoting it. By now the subject of his presentation must be obvious – the human voice.99
Though some say that PowerPoint, used an estimated thirty million times a day, helps the mumbling, forgetful, or plain incompetent speaker to get their main points across, others argue that it’s designed ‘to close down debate, not open it up’.100 PowerPoint tries to tame the unpredictability and delinquency of the voice, and transform it instead into writing, with all that medium’s stability. PowerPoint tries to resolve the conflict between the now unavoidable requirement to make public presentations, and the anxiety about speaking with the body. It expresses a loss of faith in the voice. Today we want machines to do the talking for us.
The voice has travelled a long way since Thomas Watson, Bell’s assistant, first heard him say, ‘Mr Watson, come here. I want you,’ down the wire. Disembodied voices no longer have the same power to disturb. We’re not fazed by the preservation of dead people’s voices. And awash with radio stations, listeners have become blase about hearing ordinary people speak over the airwaves, but can be thrown by an ineptly dubbed voice. Today we constantly hear people we could never hope to meet: through the telephone, phonograph (and its successors), radio, cinema, and the television, we hear a greater number and variety of voices in a month than people heard in a lifetime in the past.
By giving us access to such a profusion and diversity of voices, the new technologies have encouraged the belief that everyone is entitled to be heard. Yet, after decades of exposure to radio and television, people being interviewed now speak like other people they’ve heard being interviewed – we know how we’re meant to sound.
Although it gave a good impression of doing so, technology never really severed the body from the voice or later restored it: theirs always has been an on-off partnership, a relationship that has continued to shift throughout the emergence of even newer technologies at the end of the twentieth century.