The voice is elusive. Once you've eliminated everything that is not the voice itself—the body houses it, the words it carries, the notes it sings, the traits by which it defines a speaking person, and the timbres that color it, what’s left? — Michel Chion Sound if often heard but not seen. And I’m not talking about seeing the source of that sound, but to see the sound waves, the vibratory patterns—to put sound in the spotlight as material form and it being physically present as part of the world that’s being shown in the frame. We tend to always relate a voice with body just as we relate a sound effect with an object. But, what happens when we separate the voice from the original source and give it to another body or object? My focus is not going to be on how sound makes itself visible when we analyze its physics, my focus is going to be on the marriage of the voice with another body. How the detachment of b...
Nicole A. Watlington is a sound editor and designer based in New York City. She holds a B.S. in Recording Arts and a B.A. in Screen Studies.