The data-driven voice-body in performance: AI voices as materials, mediators, and gifts

Data-driven, realistic and identity-bearing AI voice technologies have proliferated in recent years. Voice, a multiply embodied phenomenon situated within and across human bodies in space and time, is deeply disrupted by the disembodying tendencies of AI voice technologies and their processes of data collection and data creation, resulting in the need for a re-evaluation of perceptual, cognitive and cultural factors. This article addresses this need by synthesizing ideas from embodied cognition, voice studies, and material anthropology to analyze real-time, AI-mediated voice as a form of embodied cognition that is an intersubjective, extended, materially and socially distributed phenomenon. Through the case study of the live performance iː ɡoʊ weɪ, this article makes three contributions: (1) it articulates AI-mediated vocal identity as a process of continual reconfiguration across human and machine agencies; (2) it foregrounds audience perception as an active force in stabilising and destabilising emergent voice–body assemblages; and (3) it proposes a speculative ethical framework for vocal data practice grounded in the notion of voice as gift.