Yet go deeper into the digital world and the voice finds endless new forms, further integrated into its landscape. I had been listening to the music of Oakland-based Nima for quite some time before I realised that her tracks, though they regularly draw on recorded vocals, are not songs per se. On Spirit Sign and her upcoming tape for Harsh Riddims, SEE FEEL REEL, the voice has partly receded into the musical environment, becoming part of the furniture of her airy and mysterious rooms. Even with words attached, her voice does not compete with percussion and keyboard riffs. The final tracks of both albums (called "Landscapes" on Spirit Sign) feature synthesised speech, as if completing a transition from human to machine, yet it's set against some of Nima's most elegant instrumental textures. At the end of SEE FEEL REEL, a voice almost obsessively repeats crypto-romantic refrains such as I'm... in love... with... the... digital age... over strings, before switching to breathy voice-like tones as if it were dissolving into air. Nima's music certainly lives in the digital age, and all the elements within it expand to fill the enormous space that results.

spirit sign by nima



Another producer who has been using synthesised speech is Chaz Allen as Metallic Ghosts, also well known as one of the folks behind live-streaming platform SPF420. Echoing Ferraro's celebrated album Far Side Virtual, where a synthesised voice appears as a touchscreen waiter and a virtual chef, Metallic Ghosts employs them on his albums The Pleasure Centre and Sky Tower 2032 as narrators and characters in a drama. Yet my favourite Metallic Ghosts release is the multidimensionally weird The City of Ableton, which is ostensibly just an injoke about the Ableton software used by so many producers, depicting it—squarely according to neoliberal capitalist rhetoric—as a city of endless possibilities. To do this, Allen adopts a musical style that idiosyncratically evokes the urban-planner-simulation game series Sim City, a screenshot from which provides the album's cover. Both musically and conceptually, the album suggests a dream cityscape as it might have appeared at the turn of the 1990s, a weird, multicoloured, postmodern union of the past and the future, where citizens of all professions glide beatifically down immaculate beige sidewalks past bright red fire stations, neo-1930s banking skyscrapers, parping bandstands, faux-eighteenth-century colleges, and green, green, lawns, all presided over by a moustachioed mayor who warmly greets his public at the exponential tree-planting and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. One of the crucial components of this digital landscape—now looking rather misplaced, both poignant and arrogant, in the post-recession era—is the voice. Fittingly, the vocals, and the human beings hinted at behind it, are just yet further objects swirling in the cityscape, forming its melodies, scatting ooh and aah or urging Work it! and Get down like feckless, automated cheerleaders. It's a landscape we might recognize and enjoy with a little disquiet mixed in.

The technique Allen uses to deploy voices in the track "Mass Transit" is called sample-based synthesis, and involves inputting samples into a synthesiser so that every key plays a sample whose pitch corresponds to that key, allowing you to play a sampled vocal as if it were a piano. It was also used by Allen-associate Saint Pepsi on his recent EP Gin City (which is akin to a mini tour of different uses of the voice in the online underground) on the track "Mr Wonderful." When the track's lead tune moves onto a more conventional synthesiser, the effect is not of a singer falling silent, but of a singer showing a different side to themselves.

Sampling processes of all kinds appear in Blank Banshee's album Blank Banshee 1, a masterwork of the new digital psychedelia, and it's quite easy not to really notice that the album is filled with voices at every turn, much like its videos are filled with virtual beings, objects and environments. Despite the fact that these voices are pitched up, down and all around, they're never more than virtual avatars of their owners: social media masks that are both freeing and constraining. Freeing in that they allow the voice to move to new places and be new people, constraining in that these surrogate people are not yet as infinitely flexible and free as they would like to think they are, and might still have an air of the uncanny about them. This double-edged nature of the human user in the modern digital playground, its mixture of strange new opportunities and dangers, might be why one of the tracks goes by the name "Anxiety Online."

But not all digital voices have flesh and blood humans directly behind them. With synthesised speech, the voice is the digital landscape. Wholly synthesised speech has been around for decades, appearing on Kraftwerk records of the 1970s in roles such as the voice of energy... a giant electricity generator. But in the past decade, an entire subculture (mostly confined to Japan but with strong showings in Europe and North America) has grown up around a software series that synthesises song: vocaloids. Developed by Yamaha and produced mainly by the brilliantly named Japanese company Crypton Future Media, vocaloids offer the user the chance to create a voice that can sing both melodies and lyrics, based on 'sound banks' recorded by human singers (so really, they're a kind of sample-based synthesis). They appear in a wide range of different voices, languages and genders, and one of the most interesting things about them is that they are personified with given names, images (which typically appear on album covers), even ages and weights. As such, they are treated much like the J-pop idols they emulate. Disconcertingly, there are far more female vocaloids than male ones, and they are invariably more popular—probably because women are more likely to be treated as objects, even technological ones (for example, in films from Metropolis through to Spike Jonze's recent Her, about a man who falls in love with a speaking operating system).

The most popular vocaloid is Hatsune Miku [pictured above], whose name means something like 'first sound of the future.' First released in 2007, her success greatly expanded the profile of vocaloids, eventually causing vocaloid compilation albums featuring her, such as Exit Tunes Presents: Vocalogenesis, to top the Japanese charts. And long before Tupac appeared as a hologram, Miku (who wasn't even biologically born let alone killed) used the same technology to appear in front of a live band and an audience of fans in 2010. She has since performed a duet with another popular vocaloid, Megurine Luka. Miku has even opened for Lady Gaga, and was immortalised on two metal plates attached to the Akatsuki space probe bound for Venus (where else?). Vocaloids don't quite sound realistic, but that isn't entirely the point. For me, part of their appeal is in their human yet beyond-human qualities. One of my favourite vocaloids is Sonika, primarily due to the bizarre, clucking chorus of her song "Sonika Says."





Vocaloid producers around the world have observed a convention of putting a 'P' after their moniker, which stands for 'producer.' One of the most popular vocaloid producers on Bandcamp is Circus-P, who uses them for the vocal lines of rave pop. Others include the hypersentimental Empath-P and the trancey Daria-P. 'Vocaloid' is a widespread tag on Bandcamp and Soundcloud, and there are underground record labels devoted to vocaloid producers, such as Vocallective. While the dedicated subculture tends to use them for pop and hardcore dance, vocaloids have appeared in dozens of different genres, including disco / funk, metal, jazzy hip-hop beats, chilled-out house, indie rock, traditional, trappy witch house, mashup humor, pop punk, and even opera.



