“They Were There When the Noise Started”

By Kristen Gallerneaux

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How does the human voice haunt our technology? This piece explores the idea of voice as contagion and the “sonic spectre”—a concept connected to how sound has infiltrated our technologies in surprising and magical ways. A path is traced from poltergeist events and the talking dolls of Thomas Edison into the work of Richard Gagnon, inventor of the Votrax text-to-speech synthesizer. The Votrax voice, modelled on Gagnon’s own, spread through electronic music and pop culture, clandestinely weaving itself into the music of Kraftwerk, educational robots, and classic arcade games. The soundtrack makes use of samples recovered from a Votrax speech board and archival recordings discovered within the speech synthesis archives at the Smithsonian Institution. These same samples have also been time-stretched into ambient tones.