London’s Royal Opera Explores What It Means To Have A Voice (And Lose It)

A child speaks into total darkness: “This is my voice.” Clear articulation, delivery just slightly hurried. As we descend in a huddle through the auditorium of the Linbury theatre, other voices – older, more obviously gendered – speak the same refrain. Some sound confident (“this is my voice”, trumpets one), others less so. Some overlap, speaking almost in chorus. All are unmistakably individual.

Three scrims hang in the main performance space. “What does it mean to have a voice?” The question appears silently, white type on black fabric. “And what does it mean to lose it?” In the week that Google has released Gemini Live, an AI voice assistant that allows users to have “natural conversations” with its chatbot, and months after Afghan women responded to the Taliban outlawing female voices in public by posting videos of themselves singing, such issues are critical. But in a space that often rings with the sound of highly trained operatic voices, audience chatter and critical opinion, the questions posed by The Sound Voice Project’s immersive installation are unusually self-conscious.

Answers take the form of three short videos, each featuring people who have experienced voice loss. In “Paul”, two men, both dressed in a white shirt and black trousers, stand and look directly at the camera. The “dual aria” they perform is like nothing I’ve ever heard. Baritone Roderick Williams sings the long, expressive lines of Hannah Conway’s score accompanied by the majestic stride of piano chords as he urges us to “listen carefully, I will whisper. Let me sing to you in your dreams.” But entwined with his operatic voice is that of Paul Jameson, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2017. Jameson’s delivery is slow and careful, some consonants out of reach. “This is my voice”, Williams sings, “and it sounds to me” – “like my life and soul”, Jameson adds, enunciating with effort written across his face.

Jameson now speaks with an artificial voice, based on a recording made of his own some years ago. “My recreated voice is a good likeness”, he told a rapt audience at an Insights event after the first London screening, “but I promise it was not this dull and monotone. Some will probably disagree …” He gets a good laugh. But as he explains, “When you lose your voice, it takes away more than just your ability to communicate. You also lose part of your identity, personality and persona.”

Tanja Bage had only a week to prepare for that loss when she was diagnosed with a rare form of laryngeal cancer and told a total laryngectomy was her only option. “Tanja” opens with a video Bage made during that week for her two small children, explaining what was happening. “It makes me sad because you’re so little … and you probably won’t remember what Mummy’s voice sounded like,” she says, smiling weakly. She reassures them she’ll still be able to read them stories, sing with them, make silly noises. Her voice is a warm mezzo, her accent softly Liverpudlian.

Conway’s score puts Bage in duet with soprano Lucy Crowe. Once again, the combination is almost unbearably poignant. But here it’s Bage’s “new” voice – expressed as she touches the speaking valve in her neck – that provides consolation, insisting “I’m OK” in response to Crowe’s painfully melodic pleas: “Take anything, but please not my voice!”

Such is the intimate connection between voice and identity, the very notion of voice loss is a deeply emotive one. This installation is not light entertainment – but it’s also hopeful. Bage is a member of the Shout at Cancer choir that features in the installation’s third video I Left My Voice Behind. Its members have all experienced voice loss; their vocal tone is gritty, even slightly harsh, in speaking and singing alike. In Conway’s score, their rhythmic delivery counterpoints with two cellos. One plays a scrap of the opening of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, only for it to dissolve into pizzicato, Elgar’s music forgotten. Later, a “digital choir” of their own so-called natural voices is synthesised with unabashed artificiality, injecting the brash vocoder sound of late-20th-century pop.

What is a “natural” voice, anyway, in an age increasingly obsessed by AI? Even that is nothing new: Wolfgang von Kempelen completed his first experiments with “speaking machines” well over 200 years ago. Yet there’s no denying our continued reliance on – and attachment to – our voices. “Losing my natural voice is one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through,” Bage told a Radio 4 documentary. “I’ve grieved it. I still grieve it.”