Vocal Codes: Lip-Reading and Early Signal Processing in the Telephone System

In the second half of the nineteenth century, oralism succeeded sign language at the majority of deaf schools in the United States. Drawing on “the German system,” American oral educators self-consciously attempted to move their field “from quackery to science.” Lip-reading, a central instrument of oral pedagogy, relied on insights from physiology and phonetics regarding the elemental vocal organs and the correlation of their gestures to sounds. By the first decades of the twentieth century, engineers at American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) also became interested in the parameters of speech as they attempted to streamline transmission technology. In turn, they examined the radical simplification of speech by the technique of lip-reading. The inventor of the vocoder, for instance, shifted the representation of speech from the facsimile-waveform approach of the early telephone system to an “analysis-synthesis” method based on the lipreader’s assumption of underlying vocal codes. In this talk, I will discuss the oralist perspective on “the medium of speech” and “the mechanism of the vocal organs,” and I will trace the specific associations between AT&T and the New York area lip-reading community. I will also consider the politics of technology transfer, namely the movement of techniques from the domain of “assistive” technology to that of mainstream engineering.