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Speaking Machine



Brigitte Felderer
Orality

Sprechmaschine: Skizzen bzw. Bauplan von Jakob ScheidJakob Scheid’s design for the speaking machine follows the instructions that the inventor of the machine published in 1791: in Mechanismus der menschlichen Sprache nebst Beschreibung einer sprechenden Maschine (Vienna 1791) Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734–1804) set out a detailed description for the reproduction of his speaking machine.

Between 1783 and 1785, Kempelen had demonstrated his speaking machine in many German towns, as well as in London and Paris. Each demonstration followed a specific pattern, with Kempelen asking the public to suggest a few words, which he then repeated with his machine; at the end of the demonstration, he opened the device and explained the individual parts. Kempelen’s aim was not just to amaze his public, nor simply to investigate the mechanism of the human voice. The machine was above all intended to be of educational value and to give the deaf an instrument to produce speech. The speaking machine was intended for a social space located beyond that of the prestigious structures of “halls of mirrors,” the pedagogical and therapeutic space of the education of the “new individual.” This set up models that were not to be viewed such as in churches or the court, but instead were to be listened to.

The process of such educational discipline is better described in acoustic than in optical metaphors. For instance, one issue was that of the “voice” as a metaphor for political maturity, another that of “free speech and expression of opinion.” Likewise, the (machine-based) training of the deaf embodied the fundamental political interests of the Enlightenment, the attempt to give a voice to the traditionally silent members of society – as “the main bond of human brotherhood, the basic tenets of society,”1 to quote Kempelen. However, it was not a law of acoustics but rather an exact hearing that controlled the handling of the machine. Kempelen’s scientific merit was that he was the first person to make serious attempts to generate the individual sounds not using different pipes, but instead using levers, valves and a flexible rubber horn to form and articulate the sound of a single pipe. This was the first time that the creation of the sounds was sought not merely in a reproduction of the anatomy of the human speech organs, but instead took the decisive step towards a mechanical and abstracting synthesis.

Although Jakob Scheid followed the historical model and the mechanism corresponds entirely to that from the 18th century, the result cannot simply be described as a mere reproduction. Kempelen had taken mechanisms and components from a number of different fields and given them a new function. Scheid took over this idea of bricolage and likewise made use of everyday products, such as silicone, wood fiberboard or Perspex. The ordinariness of the elements used, and the fact that the artist does not assemble “his” instrument until he is standing in front of his public, make the machine’s voice seem all the more astonishing and no doubt uncanny, even for a modern media-sophisticated public that regards disembodied machine voices as being a matter of course. Scheid’s machine discloses the subconscious of modern media consumption and illustrates how we have learned to ascribe a disembodied voice to the “remote presence” (Vilém Flusser) of another person and to accept it as an independent identity. Today, the speaking machine no longer has an uncanny effect, not because speech synthesis is new and strange to us as it was to Kempelen’s public but because Scheid’s public does not know who is there when the machine begins to speak.

Footnotes:


1 Wolfgang von Kempelen, Mechanismus der menschlichen Sprache nebst Beschreibung einer sprechenden Maschine, Vienna 1791, p. 26.

 
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