From Telephones to Auto-Tune

For as closely linked as the voice is to our body and sense of identity, there are also a lot of external forces affecting our voices, both social and technological. In fact, when we’re talking about mediated voices—voices we hear in music, film, and of course, on the radio—we’re actually not talking about “voices” any more. We’re talking about signal processing. And, as media historian Jonathan Sterne tells Craig Eley, signal processing shapes the sound of all vocal media, from your telephone calls to the music of T-Pain.