‘Take anything, but please not my voice!’: the Royal Opera’s Sound Voice Project
In a space that usually rings with opera, a poignant and moving video installation examines the intimate connection between our voices and our selves.
A child speaks into total darkness: “This is my voice.” Clear articulation, delivery just slightly hurried. As we descend in a huddle through the auditorium of the Linbury theatre, other voices – older, more obviously gendered – speak the same refrain. Some sound confident (“this is my voice”, trumpets one), others less so. Some overlap, speaking almost in chorus. All are unmistakably individual.
Three scrims hang in the main performance space. “What does it mean to have a voice?” The question appears silently, white type on black fabric. “And what does it mean to lose it?” In the week that Google has released Gemini Live, an AI voice assistant that allows users to have “natural conversations” with its chatbot, and months after Afghan women responded to the Taliban outlawing female voices in public by posting videos of themselves singing, such issues are critical. But in a space that often rings with the sound of highly trained operatic voices, audience chatter and critical opinion, the questions posed by The Sound Voice Project’s immersive installation are unusually self-conscious.
