Review of: A Bocca Chiusa , Piersandra Di Matteo (2024) Rome: Luca Sossella Editore, 224 pp., ISBN 979-1-25998-058-8, p/bk, EUR 15.20
As synthetic speech increasingly approaches human-like naturalness, understanding how labelling as ‘human’ or ‘AI-generated’ shapes listeners’ perceptions is crucial for communication research, voice studies and AI transparency policy. This study examines how explicit and sometimes misleading labels influence evaluations of highly natural-sounding AI-generated voice clones vs. human speakers. In an online experiment ( N = 200), participants rated short novel excerpts spoken by humans or generated with ElevenLabs Multilingual v2, each paired with either accurate or intentionally incorrect labels. Two consistent effects emerged: human voices were rated more positively than AI-generated voices and recordings labelled ‘human’ received higher ratings than those labelled as ‘AI-generated’, regardless of the actual voice type. Notably, AI voices labelled as ‘human’ were rated more positively than human voices labelled as ‘AI-generated’, indicating that labelling can partly outweigh auditory impressions. Age moderated this effect – older participants rated AI-labelled voices more positively and showed smaller differences between label conditions. Women rated voices more positively than men, while professional background in communication and prior experience with AI voices had no effect. Although limited by the restricted voice set and non-interactive design, the findings illustrate how symbolic framing shapes auditory perception and underscore the importance of transparent, communication-sensitive labelling practices.
Review of: AI and Digital Innovations for Voice and Vocal Music, Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 7 March 2025
At once required to be clearly perceptible to the performer(s) and undetectable to the audience, the opera prompter’s voice occupies a liminal space – between public and private, voiced and unvoiced, present and absent. This text investigates how such a paradoxical position may assist in (re)constructing a trans* voice similarly marked by tensions around audibility, legibility and control. Written from the perspective of a transgender man and opera prompter, the text examines how the act of prompting – voicing discreetly, incorrectly and excessively – can offer a framework for rehearsing trans* embodiment and desire. Grounded in performance theory, queer phenomenology and the author’s own practice, the article traces how eroticism, failure and sonic leakage emerge as sites of resistance to normative vocal expectations. The prompter’s task of mouthing into the void becomes a metaphor for trans* vocal practice: collaborative, excessive, partial and always in transition. Rather than offering mastery or coherence, the prompter’s voice – like the trans* voice – is committed to ambiguity, misrecognition and affective intensity. This text proposes that by embracing the instability of voice, one might locate new forms of presence, intimacy and shared vulnerability. The prompter sings – not to be heard, but to be felt, misheard, needed and missed.
