#Voices from beyond series#

Recorded music enfolds these features of the voice into an artistic vision and style, packaging it as an object of individual expression and intellectual property. Emanating from the interior of the human body, the voice signifies something ineffable about a person’s identity, even their soul. While communication technologies of all kinds are haunted by apparitions of the dead, sound media uniquely bear something of a life essence. Replika, for example, is a chatbot run by a neural network trained on text conversations to create a digital doppelganger that could, in theory, become a living memorial for those left behind. Recent developments in artificial intelligence offer new ways to reach the ghosts in the machine. These cultural fictions have a force far beyond the popular imagination - and continue to shape how technologies are built and deployed. The media historian Jeffrey Sconce has traced how such cultural narratives have evolved over time into a broader unease about the dominance of digital technologies over our lives. This mythology continues to haunt cultural thinking about cyberspace, virtual reality and the internet.

#Voices from beyond series#

The radio play “War of the Worlds” and the TV series “The Twilight Zone,” among many other popular stories, expressed a cultural fascination with how new communication technologies warped time and space. From the invention of the telegraph to the later introduction of television and computers, electronic media have persistently been associated with otherworldly phenomena. And in 1920, The American Magazine published an interview with Edison where he discussed his work “building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this Earth to communicate with us.”Īll these efforts attest to the longstanding entwinement of science and the supernatural - and of the belief that telecommunication technologies might serve as channels into the afterlife.ĭigital technologies offered new spaces for these occult imaginations. Self-proclaimed “phone-voyants” touted their unique abilities to reach the departed by telephone. During Spiritualist seances, mediums employed knocking sounds echoing the then-new telegraph machine. Well into the 20th century, nearly every new communication technology was harnessed in service of cultural fantasies of transmitting disembodied voices from the great beyond. The core beliefs animating early sound media suggest a deeper impulse than mere preservation. Sound recording severed voice from body and gave it a new and separate existence. A person’s vocal signature is a complex and idiosyncratic cocktail of biology, physiology, habits and culture. This vision was an articulation of both the singularity of the human voice and a moment of its profound transformation. As Thomas Edison was perfecting the technologies that would become the phonograph, he celebrated the instrument’s capacity to preserve “the sayings, the voices and the last words of the dying member of the family - as of great men.” The advent of sound recording in the 19th century created new possibilities for preserving the dead. With boundaries, they can be used by artists to achieve something like creative immortality. For this reason, the history of sound recording and reproduction is rife with fantasies of technological necromancy.īut vocal deepfakes don’t have to be ghost stories. Vocal deepfakes are particularly fraught due to the unique status of the voice, which has long been understood as a vessel for the human soul. Reproduction technologies have been used to conjure dead celebrities before: Tupac Shakur’s hologram performing at Coachella, a CGI Fred Astaire in a Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner commercial, Peter Cushing in “Star Wars: Rogue One.” But with deepfakes - which use machine learning to synthesize lifelike facsimiles of human voices, images or videos - we have entered uncanny new terrain. Neville defended this creative choice, but the public mostly decried it as a creepy blasphemy of Bourdain’s memory. The director of the film, Morgan Neville, commissioned the soundbite from a company that produces vocal deepfakes from sonic archives. That pained quote, though, was generated by an AI model of Bourdain’s voice. “You are successful, and I am successful, and I’m wondering: Are you happy?” In “Roadrunner,” a film chronicling his life, he can be heard reading from a letter he wrote to a friend: “My life is sort of shit now,” he says. Last July, Anthony Bourdain’s voice was resurrected from the dead. Vanessa Chang is an independent curator senior program manager at Leonardo/ISAST and a lecturer in visual and critical studies at California College of the Arts.