The fervent desire to preserve the voice presented in this article among those in the sound reproduction community remained strong. The article addresses sound recording as “an extension of the art of oratory” and this remains incredibly true today. Much like how the article describes the emotional desire to preserve messages in vocal form, the desire of today is to capture a phonetic alphabet of one’s voice, one that could modulate itself in order to speak words in the matter with which the voices original owner spoke them. What the article presents as “preservation” is preservation of a speech, a sentence, a song. It is not preservation of the voice, or “chemical embalming” of a voice, that gives it way too much credit. The pronunciation of one sentence is a fraction of what constitutes a voice. Much like how the article gives the example of Crampton, a man who recorded his life story onto a phonograph before having his tongue removed for medical reasons, preserved his voice with the intention of reusing it, we have the chance to do the same thing with digital technology, but on a much more custom scale. Imagine being able to record the voice of a man going in for throat surgery, compiling a phonetic alphabet based around his speech patterns, and handing his voice back to him after the surgery. Imagine having a relative’s voice read an audiobook to you. That is preservation of the voice. The article seems to speak on this issue as if its cultural impact is over, but in fact what the article presents are just the first cultural hurtles the practice of archiving sound had to clear in order to take off.
Here, for fun, are the noise profiles of the phonetic alphabet. This is the cutting edge of sound preservation. Picture from:s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/d1/fa/c8/d1fac8222ca88592bce8aa4e62df4a59.jpg%5B/caption%5D
