Vox ex-machina : the voice and its digital doubles

Voice and music are inseparable in the history of language and music: they share the world of sound, within which sounds are organized and interpreted. The voice, through speech, expresses the meaning of words, and song, makes possible the artistic expression of something beyond meaning. Prosody, often described as the "music of the spoken voice", with its variations in pitch, rhythm, intensity, vocal quality and phrasing, enables us to free ourselves from the strict meaning of words, allowing us to express our feelings and emotions. However, the analogy is not complete, and the voice remains a musical instrument in its own right: at once a bearer of meaning right down to its musical expression, and at the same time irreducible to linguistic and musical systems through its capacity to produce unheard-of sounds.
This voice/music duality was particularly at work in the ^20th century in the development of new languages and means of expression. From "sound poetry" and "spoken-sung" at the beginning of the ^20th century to the present day, poets, musicians and composers have swept across the entire spectrum of the voice to explore its modes of expression and formalize its writing. The advent of machines and algorithms has greatly accelerated this process, making it possible to reunite voice and music in an expression that transcends words and meaning. This presentation takes us on a journey through vocal machinery from the 1950s to the present day, and provides an opportunity to sketch out a contemporary reading of the links forged between science, technology and musical creation.