Vocal recognition before recording: techniques of vocal documentation, classification and identification in the long nineteenth century

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to sketch out a cultural history of documenting, classifying and identifying voices in the nineteenth century. Focusing on a period before technologies like the spectogram became widely available, I demonstrate that experts in this period already harboured many of the ideas and ambitions that would later drive the development of technologies in speech recognition and the voiceprint. First, the idea that each human voice was unique – and therefore individual – was thoroughly developed in. Secondly, various embodied techniques for the description, comparison and recognition of particular voices were developed throughout the century, mobilising both the human ear and visual aids. Drawing on insights from the fields of voice studies and sound studies, and based on scientific, pedagogical, and musical expertise formulated and circulated in Britain, France, and Germany in the nineteenth century, the paper teases out the trajectory of these techniques, and changing vocabularies of vocal uniqueness. Central to the idea that voices were “as different from each other as faces”, were cultural assumptions about distinctions between different (European) national, cultural, and gendered voices, making the pre-history of speech recognition a cultural history, as much as it is a history of science or technology.

KEYWORDS:

• History of the voice
• history of the body
• articulation
• gender
• ethnicity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I want to express my thanks to Karin Bijsterveld and Anna Kvicalova for their substantial work in eliciting and helping to shape this article. I am also grateful for Willemijn Ruberg’s and Mike Mopas’ helpful suggestions to improve on the first draft, and for Nataliia Odnosum’s and Jan Schroeder’s suggestions on detective fiction. Research for this paper was made possible through funding by the European Research Council (ERC StG 2017, CALLIOPE).

2. In the context of this essay, vocal recognition tools, in fact, precede both technologies to study and measure sound vibrations and to record and reproduce them.

3. As, for example, the work of Willemijn Ruberg has shown, cultural entanglements of embodied identities played as important a role in the development of forensic science as the cultivation of particular techniques or tools – for instance, in performances of expertise or in the resilience of cultural symbolic meanings attached to bodily features and functions (Ruberg 2019).

4. The collections are now held in the Wellcome Library, the libraries of the Royal College and Royal Conservatory of Music, the Bibliothèque nationale, the Samuel Heinicke Library, and the Library for the Hochschule Felix Mendelssohn. Although the collections roughly represent expertise formed and published in Britain, France, and the German Lands, respectively, they also contain work from further afield – for example, southern Europe and the United States – as local experts consulted this work (sometimes in translation) as well.

5. In its overlap with histories of science and technology, this study also leans heavily on insights from sound studies that have been concerned with histories of acoustics and mediated sounds (e.g. Sterne 2003), although its main points of reference are interdisciplinary approaches that traverse sound studies, voice studies, and musicology (e.g. Eidsheim 2019; Jarman 2013; Stoever 2016).

6. This turn towards biological ideas surrounding the temperaments of singers and speakers arose out of earlier ethnicised ideas on the sounds of cultural diversity (see e.g. Solanki 2022) and more or less coincided with the rise of ideas on heredity in criminal anthropology. Although biological determinism did not entirely prevail in either field, the influence of eugenicist and determinist ideas is palpable throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. See Gibson (2002).

7. See also Hoegaerts (2021), research based on Archives nationales (Pierrefitte), AJ/37/84.

8. Historians of emotions have likewise noted that practices of experiencing and understanding or perceiving “inner” feelings are culturally modulated and (thus) historically contingent. In this text, I focus exclusively on practices of vocal articulations of individuality rather than the affective and emotional charge of the self, but I lean on the insights of historians of emotion and interiority like Fay Bound Alberti (2010), Rob Boddice (2017), and Monique Scheer (2012).

9. The history of the laryngoscope is somewhat contested, but the introduction of the laryngoscopic mirror is usually dated around 1860, with several musical and medical experts claiming to be its “inventor”. Historical narratives reconstructed by practitioners of otorhinolaryngology have focused largely on the history of the laryngoscope as either a competition between its inventors or a story of scientific progress (e.g. Bailey 1996; Cooper 2004; Lapeña 2013).

10. An application of photography proposed by René Marage, in which vocal vibrations would be transmitted to a rubber band, shown in a mirror, and photographed in quick succession (Marage 1911, 88).

11. A thorough overview of the rich methodological tapestry developed within sound studies to understand the cultural (Erlmann 2014), media (Sterne 2014), music-educational (Ochoa Gautier 2014), medical (Rice 2013), and scientific (Bijsterveld 2019) histories of listening is beyond the scope of this article. The histories of describing, comparing, and recognising voices is, of course, entangled with practices of listening, but not, I would argue, identical to it: the focus of the latter is precisely to wrestle understandings of the voice away from the (individual) ear and into the realm of the social (or at the very least the anthropometric). This is why the period ear – which is essentially just the historically contextual ear “of its time”, rather than a specifically or technically trained one – is important to keep in mind here, as it channels the social and cultural context that underpinned normative ideas about vocal production and individuality at the time.

12. This is illustrated, for example, by the suspicious attitude towards ventriloquised voices (Connor 2000).

13. As noted by a large range of works, including popular historical ones, Sherlock Holmes is often described as a “pioneer” of forensic science, a characteristic of the fictional detective primarily connected to his creator’s expertise in medicine (See, e.g. King 2020; O’Brien 2014, 2017).

14. Using text mining and big data techniques in combination with text-to-speech technology as well as a reconstruction of the room, the project illuminates a number of practical as well as discursive realities of the (sonic) practices of the courtroom: https://oldbaileyvoices.org/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Josephine Hoegaerts

Josephine Hoegaerts is professor of European Culture after 1800, at the capacity group European Studies where she teaches on questions of diversity, identity and political culture. She leads the project CALLIOPE: Vocal Articulations of Parliamentary Identity and Empire (ERC StG 2017). Her research focuses on the history of the human voice, cultural practices and politics of vocalisation, and the different discourses and meanings attached to speech and song. Recently, she authored “Voices that Matter: Methods for Historians Attending to the Voices of the Past,” Historical Reflections (2021). She has co-edited several issues on sound, music, and silence for the International Journal for Modernity, History and Culture; Journal for Interdisciplinary Voice Studies; and DiGeST, among others.