The Voice of a Generation
...and the Generation of Voices.
Sunday is the night for cultural event television to enliven the coldest weeks of winter. This year, the classic lineup of the Grammys, the Super Bowl, and the Oscars was interrupted by a celebration of the half-century of goofball parody and zany sketches of Saturday Night Live. It was a distraction I thoroughly enjoyed.
Among the many things worth celebrating is the voicework of these actors. In so many skits, they brought the audience into a scene by shaping their voices to the mood and moment they were parodying. Whether capturing the staccato seriousness of a newsreel voice-over, the hyped-up cheer of a 1980s toy advertisement, or the dreamy Zen of some Deep Thoughts, mastery of human voice inflection was an essential element of the most memorable sketches.
Human brains are hard-wired to listen for voices, in a region of the auditory cortex called the Superior Temporal Sulcus. It’s an adaptation, much like our ability to recognize faces, that helps us assess the identity, emotional state, and other aspects of a speaker.
But many of these SNL parodies capture cyborg voices, a mechanical intermediary relaying a human voice. To some extent, limitations of a given recording technology shaped how the voices were captured and replayed. That mechanical processing may be why it’s so ripe for parody, and perhaps why we find it enjoyable to learn that someone else noticed the same thing we did.
It’s like the once standardized GPS voice, or a recording on a transit system telling us that doors are opening. It’s Siri and Alexa, and, more and more, it’s the AI text to speech voiceovers on short videos that consume our viewing time. The luddite in me worries that as we cede this part of our interactions to machines and further standardize one of the key information streams that evolved with our species to foster connections, we diminish ourselves, perhaps irreparably. In other words, I’m a crank, and find the canned voices annoying. I donlikem!
I was relieved to learn that one of the most popular voiceover voices on short videos today is, like the voice of the DC metro, Siri, and others, a real person.
“Jessie” is a real person’s voice, heavily processed by complex systems with limitations, but perhaps our humanity will endure this latest attempt to box a voice. Perhaps we are marking our moment in history with auditory cues that will help some future comedy troop skewer us for other limitations of our time.