Vocal recognition before recording: techniques of vocal documentation, classification and identification in the long nineteenth century

This paper aims to sketch out a cultural history of documenting, classifying and identifying voices in the nineteenth century. Focusing on a period before technologies like the spectogram became widely available, I 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 therefore individual – was thoroughly developed in. Secondly, various embodied techniques for the description, comparison and recognition of particular voices were developed throughout the century, mobilising 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, and changing vocabularies of 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.