Phonographic theatricality: The performativity of human-machine vocality

Intermingling new and old media, this article introduces the concept of phonographic theatricality to explore the performativity of human-machine vocality. It jointly discusses the theatricality of historical and new sound media: media principles that characterized the phonograph in its emergence are still evident in the speech of contemporary AI-voice agents. Phonographic theatricality is a cross-media concept describing the conditions, playfulness, contingencies, and implications of the actualization of pre-recorded voices. It covers a broad range of cases in which a machine injects a human sounding voice into a situation, usually acousmatic in its detachment from a human body, yet performing as a theatrical agent. The analysis demonstrates how sound media theatricalize truthfulness, fidelity, illusion, and trickery as part of their mediation of voices, and how humans and machines mingle in producing phonographic theatricality. Three historical dramas, as well as contemporaneous newspaper articles, caricatures and ads, unveil the rise of phonographic theatricality as a media principle, inviting and affording a discussion on the performativity of AI voices. When machines speak and laugh in human voices, they become actors, vocally reshaping the space in which they operate, charging it with theatricality.