Son[i]a #349 Jaume Ferrete
- 00:01 Your voice is not yours: borrowed voices, acquired voices
- 03:37 Voder
- 10:42 Helen Harper, switchboard operators, and vocal drag
- 13:02 Choreographies of disciplined bodies to produce “disembodied” voices
- 14:43 Deafness running through the story of sound technologies
- 23:55 Voice and vote
- 28:37 "Voz sorda II": Jokes in sign language
- 32:05 Sharing the practice, going beyond the body
- 35:31 The human microphone or running an archive through the voice
- 44:28 Echoing those who deconstruct the voice: Oriol Roqueta
- 46:26 Your father is speaking with my father’s voice
- 54:42 The Harvard Sentences and writing for synthetic voices
- 59:40 The vocalic body: an automaton in every synthetic voice
- 63:22 Los Tone Tests
- 69:18 Closing the history of voice synthesis techniques
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.