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Short abstract:

The paper traces the cultural and scientific history of categorizing and recognizing unique features of the human voice in the nineteenth century, when various visual and mechanical means started to be developed in the documentation and storage of sound.

Long abstract:

This paper aims to sketch out a cultural and scientific history of documenting, classifying and identifying voices in the nineteenth century. Focusing on a period before technologies like the spectogram, or acoustic recording devices became widely available, I aim to demonstrate that experts in this period already harboured many of the ideas and ambitions that would later drive the development of technologies in speech recognition and the voiceprint. First, the idea that each human voice was unique – and could therefore be used as a tool to recognize an individual – was thoroughly developed in the nineteenth century, and scientific underpinnings for this premise were studied. Secondly, various embodied techniques for the description, comparison and recognition of particular voices were developed throughout the century, mobilizing both the human ear and visual aids. Drawing on insights from the fields of voice studies and sound studies, and based on scientific, pedagogical, and musical expertise formulated and circulated in Britain, France, and Germany in the nineteenth century, the paper teases out the trajectory of these techniques, as well as changing vocabularies to represent vocal uniqueness. Central to the idea that voices were “as different from each other as faces,” were cultural assumptions about distinctions between different (European) national, cultural, and gendered voices, making the pre-history of speech recognition a cultural history, as much as it is a history of science or technology.