Fitter. Happier. And the Nature of Iconic Voices.
How famous voices were a product of technological limitations and monoculture
Rime.ai’s version of Fitter Happier:
The Era of Voice Fame
Born in 1873 to an impoverished family in what was then the Kingdom of Italy, singer Enrico Caruso would eventually become arguably the first famous voice in history. In the early stages of recorded audio, where sound was captured on wax or foil cylinders, Caruso’s 1904 recording of “Vesti la giubba” was first record in history to sell a million copies. This set the stage for the next hundred years of audio culture: Because of the technical limitations to sound recording and playback, it was only financially viable to record and transmit a few select voices, and as a result, certain voices became what we now call “famous”.
Over the next century, the cost and expertise required for voice recording limited the number of voices that could serve mass media. As a result, of the millions upon millions of voices that have existed over the last few decades, most western audiences were strangely intimately familiar with just a tiny few: Katharine Hepburn, James Earl Jones, Christopher Walken, and so on.
However, the increasing democratization of recording technology and social media has lead to a proliferation of voices (along with nearly every other form of content) and fragmentation of the media landscape. It is no longer the case that a single musical act, or movie, or voice can dominate the attention of the whole society.
A Synthetic Voice Parallel
In the same way the technological limitations curtailed until recently the number of voices that could cost-effectively be recorded, so too have technological limitations prevented the flourishing of synthetic voices. Much like for the “famous” voices of real people, the limitations on the number of synthetic voices served to create something like ‘fame’ for them.
Before Susan Bennett provided the voice for Siri, there was “Fred”. A voice for the Macintosh SimpleText early word processor. Though clunky, Fred was many people’s first introduction to the world of text to speech generation. And in virtue of being effectively the only voice available*, Fred garnered some degree of what we might call “fame”. He was memorably the lead voice in Radiohead’s 1997 Fitter Happier, where he read off the lyrics with a disquieting aplomb. Here’s the original
The End of Voice Fame
At Rime, we’re leading the true democratization of voice technologies. With the tech we’re building, the artificial limitations on voice that we have faced over the last hundred years are over. And with that, so too is the era of the undemocratic tent-pole “famous voice”. Real voices have been easier to record and share for a few years, and now Rime is offering that same game-changing freedom in the realm of synthetic voices.
Fitter Happier used the tech available in 1997 to create a timely account of the relation between technology and society. Things are changing. We decided to riff on the original with the updated version above. Now the voice work is not disturbing because it’s so false, but because it’s so realistic. Take a listen!
*Fun fact: UCLA Linguistics Professor Bruce Hayes (who most of us here at Rime learned our Phonology from) was the source for another voice offering on Mac. The voice named “Bruce” was sourced from him!