Never Seen, Never Will

Admittedly, I had a very difficult time completing this assignment. It felt nearly impossible to think of something I’ve never seen but I know exists. After a long conversation with friends, I definitely had some ideas but it was still quite difficult to think of how to remediate something when I cannot draw or think visually. Eventually, I settled on sound. Specifically the sound of people’s voices. I was very interested in the fact that you can hear the sound, even feel certain sounds, but there is no real physical representation of them that you can see. Even though we hear various voices every day, voices of our loved ones and of complete strangers, we never really see them. It makes me curious about what they would look like if we could, hence the remediation of them.

Though I think this remediation would be best explained through visuals, I lack the skills to adequately portray this through drawings, so I will try my best to describe how I picture people’s voices in this new reality I have remediated.

For starters, I think everyone would have a standard color of their voice that matches their soul/aura. (Though I understand the impossible logistics of there being 7 billion unique colors, I still like to think that at least everyone in a certain area has a color that matches them specifically). For instance, I see my mom having a beautiful mauve color that would accompany her everyday voice. It is difficult for me to imagine what color I would have, but I like to think of something somewhat similar to my mom's. From there, when the emotion you’re feeling changes, your color would slightly shift to match that. The base color would remain the same, but other stereotypical color associations would alter the shade. For instance, my mom’s main color would be mauve, and when she was mad, a red hue would mix with the mauve to make a new color to visually demonstrate that she is mad. When people are speaking over one another/voices overlapping, the same thing occurs. The voices meet in the middle and ultimately create a color that is the combination of their unique shades.

The next important aspect of remediating voices into a physical shape would be the way they move. Naturally, this too goes along with the emotion behind what someone says, but I see there being a standard similar to when you blow out a candle. When you blow out a candle, there is smoke that slowly twists, dances and ultimately rises into the air; an unpredictable pattern each time that eventually dissipates into the air. For lack of a better comparison, the speaker is the candlewick, and their voice is the smoke. In their “natural” color, their voices lightly twist and dance towards the person they are speaking to.

Personally, I have never really seen voices identified in this way, with the exception of maybe the Little Mermaid, but even so, I see this interpretation to be far more personalized to an individual. I did not realize it when I started remediating this, but ultimately this version of voices makes it explicitly clear the intent and emotion behind what someone says, which I find can sometimes be tricky. In this world, there is hardly any miscommunication, because everything you say is seen in an honest and raw way.

Overall, I really enjoyed this remediation process and I enjoyed being pushed to think about things in a way that I had never before, even if it took me an absurdly long time!