ABSTRACT
Voice has the agency to touch, to act on the body of the listener. The relational nature of voice is a subject that has been of interest to philosophers. The voice, therefore, tells of the speaker's subjective history. Discussions of the nature of voice often focus on the role of the maternal voice in the formation of the subject. The female voice is also the repository of powerful cultural fantasies — both positive and negative — about the 'mother' and the maternal space and time. The floating voice, the acousmatic voice has long been used by theatrical performers and film-makers to create a sense of unease in an audience. Luce Irigaray suggests that the voice's power to sound the lost other, and to effect perpetual movement between self and other, has been lost, buried by culture. In theatre, as Don Ihde remarks, sounded language surrounds and penetrates the recesses of the self and the other.
