Son[i]a #349
Jaume Ferrete
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In a body of work that encompasses the creation of texts, recordings, performances, concerts, websites, listening sessions, educational workshops, and archives of conversations, Jaume Ferrete (b. Mollet del Vallés, 1980) explores everything that affects and influences the ideologies of the voice. His projects openly refrain from naturalising identity and address vocal production as a complex social phenomenon, shaped by the surrounding echoes and reverberations. The lines that appear in his work include cross-dressing on stage, shifting the parameters of speech intelligibility, probing the community aspects of sign language, and testing how synthetic voices rarefy the presence of the body in performance practice. Ferrete maintains that there are many potential vocalic bodies in all voices: bodies ready to appear. Technologically reproduced voices—because they are not strictly human—open up a profusion of strange bodies, which do not sound like us, and which are always difficult to imagine.
In this podcast, Jaume Ferrete talks about Helen Harper, about the bodily discipline of telephone operators, and about the Voder as a clear example of drag. He cites deafness as a crucial phenomenon fuelling the history of sound technologies and connects some key moments—from the Voder to WaveNet—in the development of voice synthesis technologies. Our conversation also touches on ventriloquism, human microphones, and how the gramophone emerged to reflect something that is ours back to us as something alien, turning the technological echo of our voices into potential opportunity.
Nina Power
Nina Power shares her thoughts on the ideological power of language, on systems of state violence, surveillance and control, and on the need to reverse the savage logic of neoliberalism through strategies such as commoning and her own notion of “decapitalism”.
The inhuman voice
Since the late eighteenth century, speech therapists, linguists, entrepreneurs, artists and musicians have nurtured the dream of emulating human speech. In this mix, Genís Segarra offers a personal overview of a subject that fascinates him, with the story of voice synthesis as a narrative thread.