Digital voice: Contemporary Chinese voice media and the techno-vocal configurations of embodiment

This article introduces the concept of digital voice to investigate the bustling soundscape of contemporary Chinese digital media. Digital voice, as I contend, constitutes both a techno-vocal condition that reworks existing ideas of voice, body, subjectivity, and sociality, and an iterative process of digital performance, in which voice partakes in the manifold human practices of meaning-making and world-making. Specifically, I attend to three forms of digital voice: ASMR, digital voice acting, and AI synthetic voice. The three case studies delineate contrasting yet complementary modalities of techno-vocality, of voice's embodiment, disembodiment, and re-embodiment, through which relations among body, labor, and value are negotiated and transacted under China's digital capitalism. Juxtaposing perspectives from voice practitioners, audiences, AI engineers, and data workers, the article demonstrates how the digital condition has introduced new ways of experiencing voice, and how these experiences refract broader tensions between embodiment and virtualization, and between automation and labor extraction.