Voice as a Matter of Design: a Framework for Novel Vocal Imaginaries

This project critically explores the affective and sociocultural implications for human-machine configuration in a time where voice has become a matter of design. Voice is increasingly a medium through which we interact and relate to technology and in the last decade, Voice-based User Interfaces (VUIs) such as Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Home, and Amazon’s Alexa have become a million-dollar investment. In human-to-human interaction, we know that voices are complex, variable and diverse; the minute nuances of tone of voice influence the affective tonality and interpretation of what and how we are trying to communicate in sociocultural contexts (Meizel 2020). Voice is both a matter of expression and of being heard, and connects deeply to feelings of intimacy, identity, sociality and performativity (LaBelle 2014). Current primarily Western synthetic voice designs often present us with heteronormative vocal stereotypes, that do not take this vocal diversity into account (Baird et al. 2018; Danielescu 2019; Phan 2017). When something is designed, it means it could be different. The present project Voice as a Matter of Design offers a conceptual and design- oriented foundation for challenging the normative vocal stereotypes embedded in present day VUIs.

We conceptually frame the project around voice as a matter of design unfolding the voice as 1) a ‘design material’ (Sutton et al. 2019) or ‘sonic material phenomenon’ (Weidman 2014) with particular qualities that can be shaped and modelled, and 2) a ‘matter of concern’ (Latour 2005) when analyzing and designing interactive human-machine configurations in design research more broadly (DiSalvo et al. 2014). From this framing we arrive at the main research question driving the project:

How can we understand and conceptualize voice as a complex, variable and diverse matter of design?