Aya Saiki
Cornell University

Murmuring Machines: Vocal Synthesis and the Keyboard Interface

In 1930, the critic Paul Bernhard wrote that “all music is mechanical, with the sole exception for singing. All music is made mechanically; only the voice box is organic.” Such beliefs notwithstanding, attempts to simulate or synthesize the voice have been made for centuries. From the late eighteenth-century speaking machines of the abbé Mical, Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein, Wolfgang von Kempelen (famous for the chess-playing machine “The Turk”), and Erasmus Darwin to Joseph Faber’s and Herman von Helmholtz’s nineteenth-century apparatuses and the Bell Telephone Laboratory’s Voder in the twentieth century, the artificial (re)production of human vocality has been practiced in many different ways. What connects all these devices, however, is the idea of using the keyboard interface.

In 2003, Yamaha announced the new concatenative “singing synthesizer” named “Vocaloid,” which enables the user to create synthesized singing by inputting lyrics, pitches, and other musical parameters. Following the success of Vocaloid technology through commercial software such as “Hatsune Miku,” released by Crypton Future Media in 2007, Yamaha embarked on the development of the “Vocaloid Keyboard,” an instrument that enables the player to “sing by playing the voice.” This paper places the Vocaloid Keyboard in historical and media-archaeological contexts to investigate how the unique qualities of the voice have been simulated at the interface of the keyboard, which has served as a staging ground for encounters between nature and technology as well as human and machine. Using the Vocaloid Keyboard as my point of departure and arrival, I will examine the diverse ways in which the technology of the keyboard has made the conceptual resonances between disparate sites and moments of vocal experimentation audible.


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Aya Saiki is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Cornell University. She holds undergraduate and master’s degrees from King’s College London. At Cornell, she is currently working on her dissertation, which examines Tōru Takemitsu’s use of magnetic tape in the 1950s and 1960s as a window into a web of aesthetics, techniques, technology, and individuals in the overlapping spaces between avant-garde, modernism, mass culture, and commercialism in Japan. Her other research interests include musical analysis, concert culture in nineteenth-century London, sounds and music in visual media.