Originally published in: Ella Finer, The Aura of Aural, «Performance Research», vol. 22.n.3, April/May 2017 pp. 15-20
Compelled and confounded by the distance between the speaker and receiver in early telephonic communication, an anonymous reporter of the Scientific American called it ‘an airy nowhere, inhabited by voices and nothing else.’ Conceiving spatial and temporal distances as areas which can host the event of the voice, this article attends to the voice on the record as a particular example of transmission into the airy nowhere. Approaching how reproduction complicates the distance the voice performs in and through; and experimenting with how the material of the record might make the voice more material in its sounding, the research considers how the record of the voice has its own ‘auratic’ presence in the instance of its replaying.
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