The Weirding Module – It’s Easy To Tell the Depth of a Well

Amidst all the hype around voice cloning, deep fakes, AI musical artists both virtual and resurrected it's hard to discern what's real and what's industry bragging. To try understand what's at play I take a look at the long history of voice synthesis and how it has been adopted by artists and musicians and most importantly how disabled people adopted and and came to identify with synthetic voices.

Largely assembled from the original tech demos from both established tech companies and tech start ups showcasing their abilities these audio documents are often explanatory but also strangely poetic. Most interestingly these disembodied and alien voices were often given names, have characters ascribed to them and are even made to speak in the first person. No matter how synthetic, a voices seems always to invoke characteristics like age, gender, culture and mood – a voice always evokes a body.

As we approach the present I touch on Japan's history of virtual pop stars the hype around China's Lingyin Engine resurrecting dead singers and creating new ones in the service of streaming platforms.

Thanks to Betty Apple for help with translation.

Shout out to all the weird little guys.