![]() ![]() Probably one of the only example who actually acts as unemotional as a walking computer would. He's still the kind of guy who proposes killing a small child for simplicity's sake, and lacks emotions of any kind. Father Tres Equis from Trinity Blood, except he's a cold killer android.Contrast Electronic Speech Impediment, where the lack of a Machine Monotone is a cause for concern. This can be an aspect of the Uncanny Valley.Ĭompare Synthetic Voice Actor. Also a justification if the voice comes off as creepy. Despite going crazy and deciding to to Kill All Humans or simply to take over and rule us for our own good, all the threats and casually vicious comments the machine makes are made in the same level, calm mode of talking, making them that much more creepy.Ī subtrope of Creepy Monotone. This is especially evident when an artificial intelligence goes nuts. When delivered in a flat monotone voice (that is usually free of contractions or slang), even Spock Speak can take on creepy undertones. This is because, for the most part, machines are incapable of actually feeling emotions. Usually, such voices have been portrayed as either an electronic monotone, or as an endlessly calm human voice that, while certainly warmer than the electronic buzz of the synthesizer, is unsettling to listen to because of a lack of basic emotional content. I'm sure the book is great, if you already understand and accept the theories that it is based on - but it was wasted on me.Machines that speak have been a common element in Speculative Fiction almost since the beginning of the genre. ![]() Instead, it's a limited psychoanalysis of an interesting modern phenomenon. Perhaps even what the implications are for modern feminism. Either a history of vocal-interactions with machines, or a look at how speaking to machines (and having them speak back) affects us. It is obvious that I was expecting a different book. Is the only difference between male and female voices their pitch? When did the female voice become preferred for recorded announcements? What does constantly barking orders to a disembodied female servant do to your psychology? None of these questions are answered. The very earliest ones were male-ish - if only by virtue of being low pitched. There was also nothing about the history of acousmatic voices. I get that Star Trek and 2001 cast a long shadow over everything - but there's so much more to synthetic voices than them. Given the wealth of movies and TV shows with speaking-machines, it felt limited to focus on so few examples. I suppose I was expecting more of a rigorous analysis of whether the media has influenced the way in which humans expect their robots to behave. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes the colour red is for danger - not for representing the ship's uterine lining. You can read anything you like into invented symbolism. Is Picard really regressing inside his mother when he enters the holodeck? Does HAL cutting a life-support cable represent a father snipping his child's umbilical cord? Maybe, but it's all a bit wishy-washy. Some of the over-analysis seems a little far fetched to me. There is some slight analysis of what having a female- or male- voiced computer might tell us about the psyche. But the stuff about phallic-mothers castrating their Oedipal offspring in a Freudian-frenzy was alien to me.Ī large portion of the book is simply reciting the plot of slightly obscure movies. I can appreciate that people might interpret the female-voiced starship Enterprise as a pastel-coloured womb, and the male-voiced HAL9000 as a cold and sterile phallus. I'm not fully versed in modern critical theory, so lots of it went completely over my head. Instead, it's a media studies book which focuses exclusively on American TV and film. Perhaps looking at the seismic shift from the attitudes of German drivers who once rejected a female voice giving them GPS directions to the near universal acceptance of audible gynoids. I thought this was going to be about why the current crop of domestic-droids have (mostly) female coded voices. I think I'm too stupid to have understood it properly. Going beyond current scholarship on robots and AI to focus on voice-interactive computers, The Computer’s Voice breaks new ground in questions surrounding media, technology, and gender. Faber explores contentious questions around gender: its fundamental constructedness, the rigidity of the gender binary, and culturally situated attitudes on male and female embodiment. A deconstruction of gender through the voices of Siri, HAL 9000, and other computers that talkĬonsidering Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Her, and more, Liz W. ![]()
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