Jonathan Sterne’s “A Resonant Tomb” likens voice recording to the embalming of a corpse, a comparison I don’t understand or with which I disagree. Sterne writes extensively about exteriority vs. interiority in methods of preservation – embalmment is concerned with preserving the exterior of the body instead of the inside – and uses this as the primary link between embalming and sound recording. He asserts that while “speech is traditionally considered as both interior and exterior,” recorded voices, especially of the departed, “no longer emanate from bodies that serve as containers for self-awareness,” and by that token, retain “none of [their] interior self-awareness” (290). His argument seems to be that the interiority of a voice lies in its point of origin – if it is no longer linked to a body, it has lost its core.
What about voices we hear when we can’t see the speaker, then? When we are too short to see the lecturer over the heads of the people standing in front of us? Is the speech any less substantial for us than for those who can see the body from which the voice is produced?
Later, examining the painting His Master’s Voice, Sterne writes, “when we see a dog listening to a gramophone, we understand that the important issue is the sound of the voice, not what was said, since dogs are known for heeding the voices of their masters more often than their words” (303). The painting is heartbreaking because we imagine the dog recognizing the voice of his master from beyond the grave, and not understanding his absence. Another of Sterne’s anecdotes mentions a priest who recorded a sermon for his own funeral. He begins to cry at the end of his recording, after preaching, and the sound “caused a shudder of horror among those who were present” (303).
These qualities, I think, are the core of voice, a true interiority that is not lost in recording: our ability to find identity in a voice, and its ability to manipulate our emotions. In Sterne’s closing summary, he writes that voice recording “does not preserve a preexisting sonic event as it happens so much as it creates and organizes sonic events for the possibility of preservation and repetition” (332). Perhaps the emotional burden of hearing the dead priest’s eulogy, for someone hearing it in person before he was dead, would have been different from the burden on someone present at the funeral. In this way, the sonic event has not been duplicated, per say. However, the voice still has the power to affect powerful emotion, which I think is proof of some eternal interiority in sound.