Sonic Intimacy asks us who—or what—deserves to have a voice, beyond the human. Arguing that our ears are far too narrowly attuned to our own species, the book explores four different types of voices: the cybernetic, the gendered, the creaturely, and the ecological. Through both a conceptual framework and a series of case studies, Dominic Pettman tracks some of the ways in which these voices intersect and interact. He demonstrates how intimacy is forged through the ear, perhaps even more than through any other sense, mode, or medium. The voice, then, is what creates intimacy, both fleeting and lasting, not only between people, but also between animals, machines, and even natural elements: those presumed not to have a voice in the first place. Taken together, the manifold, material, actual voices of the world, whether primarily natural or technological, are a complex cacophony that is desperately trying to tell us something about the rapidly failing health of the planet and its inhabitants. As Pettman cautions, we would do well to listen. "With Sonic Intimacy , we are manifestly in the hands of a skilled and not a little playful writer who connects new media to long developed philosophical conversations. This is a book that catalyzes thinking as much as it documents thoughts, and its influence should be wide and varied."―David Cecchetto, York University " Sonic Intimacy is a perceptive, engaging, and clever set of meditations on a topic of increasing scholarly importance: how sound produces human, technical, and nonhuman intimacies. Pettman's treatment of sound across the human and nonhuman is innovative, refreshing, and quite needed at this time."―Richard Grusin, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee "The form and style of Pettman's book capture the character of this roving ear, always pricking up with the possibility of another intriguing example. Pettman is a very engaging writer, and the way he traverses contexts and theoretical horizons is thrilling...Pettman's writing is perhaps at its most exciting when it ignores expectations to pin down the voices of interlocutors and instead revels in throwing the voice, in making it seem as if it emanates from somewhere else. Pettman himself, whose body of writing gives the impression of an insatiable curiosity, is no doubt already chasing down other voices and other worlds. I urge readers, though, to let their ear linger a little longer over this intriguing little book that promises to help us discern voices where we least expect to hear them."―Naomi Waltham-Smith, Boundary 2 Dominic Pettman is Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College and The New School for Social Research. His most recent book is Infinite Distraction: Paying Attention to Social Media (2016). Sonic Intimacy Voice, Species, Technics (or, How to Listen to the World) By Dominic Pettman STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-5036-0145-1 Contents Acknowledgments, Introduction. The Aural Phase, Chapter One. The Cybernetic Voice, Chapter Two. The Gendered Voice, Chapter Three. The Creaturely Voice, Chapter Four. The Ecological Voice (Vox Mundi), Conclusion. In Salutation of All the Voices, Notes, Works Cited, Name Index, CHAPTER 1 THE CYBERNETIC VOICE IN THE REMAINING YEARS before his death in 2013, beloved film critic Roger Ebert was using customized text-to-speech software in order to communicate, since his own voice had been removed during a series of invasive surgeries designed to fight papillary thyroid cancer. The company that helped Ebert speak with a synthetic voice, CereProc, trawled through terabytes of the critic's own recordings of reviews, interviews, and commentaries in order to use his own speech as the source material. Unlike Stephen Hawking, then, Ebert's synthesized voice sounded closer to his own, albeit still with a robotic tinge to it. Despite the trauma of being robbed of one of his most essential elements (his organic voice) — not to mention one of the main tools of his trade — Ebert was able to communicate with the world in a voice that both was and was not his. In a testament to his defiant good humor, Ebert proposed a "test" named after himself, as a parallel to the Turing test. In this case, the Ebert test "gauges whether a computer-based synthesized voice can tell a joke with sufficient skill to cause people to laugh." Today, there is still some way to go before digital speech has the timing, inflection, and intonation that successfully mimics a human, let alone a comedian. (Although there are some remarkable recordings of telemarketers on YouTube that appear to sound exactly like a human being; but even these — after encountering difficult or unexpected questions — become caught in the kinds of non sequiturs and programmed aversions that we find with chat bots.) As proud and precious humans, we secretly hope that no