Media Ventriloquism: How Audiovisual Technologies Transform the Voice-Body Relationship

Jaimie Baron (ed.) et al.

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197563625.001.0001
Published: 2021 Online ISBN: 9780197563663 Print ISBN: 9780197563625

PART FRONT MATTER

Published: April 2021

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/41115/chapter/350420708 by Simon Fraser University user on 01 June 2023

Subject: Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Introduction: Singing the Body Technovocalic P2.S1

Jaimie Baron P2.P1

Most of us have inhabited technovocalic bodies. P2.P2

Every time I sing along in the car to a favorite song playing on the radio, I cease to hear my own middling P2.P3
singing voice and instead imagine my vocalizations fused to those of Ella Fitzgerald or Lady Gaga. And in
truth, I can sing along far better than I can sing alone; my voice aligns itself, more or less, with the one
resounding in my ears so that I can momentarily fancy myself a talented vocalist. When we sing karaoke, we
may likewise imagine sounding like the singer we imitate even if in reality we sound like yowling cats to our
audience. Lip-sync performance has a similar e ect—not so much on us but on our audiences—creating the
audiovisual impression of our bodies producing beautiful arpeggios of which they are, in fact, incapable.
This is true whether this is a “live” lip-sync, in which a performer pretends to be the source of a preexisting
recording, or a produced lip-sync, in which two recordings—one audio, one visual—are coordinated to
produce the impression of a singular origin.

Technovocalic singing bodies—voices enhanced by accompanying recordings or voices added to bodies that P2.P4
did not sing them—are often sources of entertainment. Watching Laverne Cox perform Destiny’s Child’s
song “Lose My Breath” on the television show Lip Sync Battle produces for me an inexplicable pleasure, the
partial deception integral to this joy. On the one hand, by visually imitating Beyoncé through her wardrobe
and dance moves, Cox performs an act of incredible embodied mimicry made even more astonishing by
Cox’s trans identity. On the other hand, however, it is the recorded presence of Beyoncé’s voice to which Cox
matches her own lip movements that makes Cox’s performance more than simply an impressive dance
routine. Even though there is no chance of actually mistaking Cox for Beyoncé, the lip-sync is what moves
p. 80 the performance beyond mimicry to an inhabitation. Beyoncé’s voice seeming to come from Cox’s lips
generates a form of possession, as if Queen Bey’s spirit has brie y taken over Cox’s body.

Of course, lip-sync is often about watching a body transcend its normal categorizations—of race and P2.P5
gender, in particular. The contrast of a white man appearing to sing with a Black woman’s voice—like Paul
Rudd lip-syncing to a Tina Turner song—risks cultural appropriation. However, it also destabilizes the
demarcation between male and female, Black and white bodies. The synthesis of disparate identities into a
single technovocalic body allows us to suspend our belief in those identities even as we remain aware of the
gap between them.
 Yet technovocalic singing bodies are also at times regarded as too deceptive. When singers purport to sing P2.P6
“live,” we may expect them to sing with ampli cation and instrumental accompaniment but may balk if we
nd out the voice we are hearing is prerecorded. When we nd out the singing voice that appears to emanate
from Deborah Kerr’s mouth in The King and I (Walter Lang, 1956) was actually the voice of Marni Nixon, we
may feel vaguely cheated or tricked. The infamous incident in which Ashlee Simpson was revealed as
mouthing along to a recording of one of her songs on Saturday Night Live in 2004 constituted a blunder from
which the pop singer never recovered. Similarly, Milli Vanilli never lived down their originally
unacknowledged lip-sync performances, their name becoming shorthand for “cheating” in song.

Moreover, at times technovocalic singing bodies become political—when the “deception” is linked, for P2.P7

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instance, to wider discourses of national, racial, or gender identity. In some cases, this form of media
ventriloquism is entwined with racial ventriloquism. Ryan Jay Friedman’s chapter “ ‘Mike Fright’: Racial
Ventriloquism in the Hollywood Talkies” explores the history of the Amos ’n’ Andy adaptation Check and
Double Check (RKO, 1930), in which image and soundtrack are combined in various ways that complicate
Hollywood’s attempt to control and commodify Black voices and bodies. Shannon Wong Lerner’s chapter
“The Black Queer/Trans Femme Representation of Beyoncé’s Media Ventriloquisms and the National Voice”
demonstrates how Beyoncé’s performance of the US national anthem at Barack Obama’s second
inauguration, for which she employed a prerecorded track of her own voice, was interpreted as a “betrayal”
but can, in fact, be seen as an act of resistance against assumptions about how Black women’s bodies are
“supposed” to behave within the national body politic. Finally, Jennifer O’Meara’s chapter “Identity Politics
and Vocal ‘Whitewashing’ in Celebrity Lip-Syncs” explores the way in which lip-sync can constitute a
p. 81 troubling form of vocal whitewashing, participating in cultural appropriation of minority identities but
also a form of cultural reappropriation in which people of color make a claim to media from which they were
previously excluded.

It is now, in fact, rather rare to experience a singing body that is not, on some level, technovocalic. Only P2.P8
when we listen to in-person a cappella performance without ampli cation can we say that the song was
untouched by technological mediation (and even then we sometimes nd ourselves mistaken).
Ampli cation, recording, reproduction, sound editing, and various types of sound manipulation and
replacement are all forms of transforming our experience of the singing human body. The placement of the
line between enhancement and deception is a matter continually under debate. This section of Media
p. 82 Ventriloquism traces that shifting line.