CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Comput. Sci.
Sec. Human-Media Interaction
This article is part of the Research TopicEmbodied Perspectives on Sound and Music AIView all 16 articles
The Data-driven Voice-Body in Performance: AI Voices as Materials, Mediators, and Gifts
Provisionally accepted
- 1Sussex Digital Humanities Lab, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom
- 2EMUTE Lab, University of Sussex School of Media Arts and Humanities, Brighton, United Kingdom
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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.
Keywords: 4E cognition, AI ethics in the arts, AI voice synthesis, embodied music interaction, vocal embodiment, Voice perception
Received: 15 Aug 2025; Accepted: 19 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Reus. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jonathan Chaim Reus
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