CANCELLED Catherine Lucas: "Speech technologies, music, and cultures of the voice 1770-1876"

Catherine Lucas, University College London (UCL), UK

Abstract:

In 1782-3, Hungarian mechanist and civil servant Wolfgang von Kempelen toured Europe with his unfinished speaking machine, an object built from, and played like, a musical instrument. Whilst in Paris, he paid a visit to another spectacle involving the deaf students of the Abbé de l’Épée, and later mused that if a machine could produce speech, then perhaps so could a deaf child. Half a century later, Cambridge master’s student Robert Willis used an organ pipe to produce the vowel series in the form of extended musical tones, offering a standardised measure for eight vowel sounds. Taken up by spelling reformer and phonetician Alexander Ellis, this musical metricisation seemed to offer a solution to the problem of diversity in spoken pronunciation, and the missing piece in forging an objective phonetic science. These case studies form part of a wider project spanning a century of speaking machines that were, in various ways, profoundly shaped by musical objects and ideas, and had particular consequences for the ontology of language and speech. At the urging of Sound Studies’ Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld I “follow the instruments” (2004), trailing them into workshops, laboratories, performance spaces, and learned societies, and into what I call “voice cultures”, communities invested in various projects for improving linguistic communication. Here, speaking machines didn’t just reflect discourse about the voice, but also suggested particular truths, ideals, and insufficiencies, and, ultimately, helped to reframe the human relationship to the act of speaking. Music, I maintain, is part of what made them so mobile.