Beyond Earshot

The first comprehensive history of the recorded voice—a lively narrative taking us from Thomas Edison's phonograph to the wonders and perils of today’s synthetic AI voices. It's hard to imagine now, but just 150 years ago, any spoken words were heard once and then lost forever: no recording technology existed to capture it. Today, we are awash in recorded and transmitted utterances: phone calls, video calls, radio, albums, television, films, online reels, and AI synthetic voices. These advances have transformed art, politics, and relationships. They have fueled revolutions, created mass surveillance systems, disseminated propaganda, lifted up artistic icons, given voice to paralyzed patients, and even cloned the voices of the dead. What does the future hold, and how can we be prepared? In Beyond Earshot, the audiophile and former Microsoft AI product strategist Matthew Quinlan takes us on a witty, engaging, erudite, and deeply human journey through the history of recorded voices, from the landmark 1877 invention that started it all—Thomas Edison’s phonograph—to Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, from the radio revolution to the first phone call from space, from the Watergate recordings that took down a president to the current deepfakes of prime ministers that are circulating online. Through it all, Quinlan shows how the recorded voice can be both singularly lifesaving and uniquely dangerous. Perhaps most important, he gives us an industry insider’s view of AI voices: how they’re produced, how they’re used, how to identify them, the latest advances, and their impact on the environment, safety, and public trust. Here is the power and the peril of the human voice unleashed.