The other of typescripts?
A trippled spatializing of writing? Of not writing?
The Stenomask metabolizes the essence of writing and of script?
The Stenomask produces nothing?
The Stenomask consumes the voice?
Word and deed: the visually integral?
Whose struggle? What obstacle?
Sign, stroke, set, press…

The Stenomask or Sylencer is a device that transcribes the human voice into a computer. Speaking into the mask, the voice is recorded by a tiny microphone. The benefit of using the Stenomask for transcription is that it muffles the sounds of its environment, but it also mutes the sound of the voice of the person who speaks into it, making it the perfect device for simultaneous translation or for court reporting. In fact, the court reporter, as voice-writer, is trained to (re)voice everything he or she hears. The reporter also trains voice-recognition software to recognize his or her voice, thereby decreasing the margin of error in the transcript. The benefit of using this device is that it is noiseless and instantaneously creates a readable text, not to mention a transcript that, according to Wikipedia, is accurate ninety-five percent of the time.

An early Edisonian disk-type Voicewriter

There are many lenses through which to encounter the mask. Even the gap between its names, Stenomask and Sylencer, suggests two different types of encounters. While Sylencer gestures to a mechanism that silences (not unlike the devise attached to a gun), the use of the name Stenomask keeps its filiation with stenography (Greek stenos ‘narrow’ + graphy) even though the lack of the suffix ‘graphy’ distances the object from the process of writing or that of graphic representation (OED). Unlike stenography, with its shorthand encoding and its emphasis on inscription, the Stenomask separates the user from the writing process by rendering the production of the inscription invisible.

Whereas writing, Flusser notes, needs a “blank surface,” “an instrument” and something which takes “the shape of contrasting matter,” the mask on the other hand, is like McCaffrey and Nichol’s printless page: “it’s a static, neutral surface” (63). In this sense, the Sylencer or Stenomask is a link in a sequence of events, and like a cypher in the mathematical sense it has no value by itself. It is only when the cypher is placed in relation to something else, say the person talking into the mask, that the mask, as cypher, converts the spoken work into written text.

In both instances, however, the names that are used to define the object suggests something more than the utility of that object. In the case of the Sylencer, the object is encountered metonymically through the object’s muting mechanism, while the Stenomask is an assemblage of a ‘narrow’ covering of the face. I point to the particularities of the names because I think the designation of each reveals at least two fundamental elements about the object: its detachment from writing and its complicated relationship to “authorship” and “inscription” through invisibility.

“To write,” Flusser states, “means, of course, to perform an action by which a material, (for instance chalk, or ink), is put on a surface (for instance a blackboard or a leaf of paper), to form a specific pattern, (for instance letters)” (1). The Stenomask, in the Flusserian sense, is not writing. The mask is merely the conduit for a human voice. By McCaffery and Nichol’s standard, the mask isn’t even quite a machine, for unlike “the book’s capacity and method of storing information by arresting, in relatively immutable form the printed word, the flow of speech conveying that information,” the mask is but a channel for transmission (60). In this sense, the Stenomask, in enacting the part of a listener, stores nothing. As a transmission device, then, the mask has much more in common with the radio.

While the radio and dictation both have the element of voice or sound wave in common, dicatating into a mask differs from other forms of dictation in that the mask creates another kind of feedback loop. In the example of the Stenomask reporter or voice-writer, the speech act is uttered by a first party, then repeated by the voice-writer, only to then be transformed into the written word by a third party: a computer software. The stenographer, in the masked formula, is no longer a scriber but a medium ready to receive transmissions and send them out into the world again. Where dictation once implied a remove between the person who is speaking, the one who is transcribing and the emergent typewrtten text, the Stenomask formula requires an additional loop in the second stage of the dictation. By repeating the speech act of the first party, the voice-writer is performing a verbal transcription that mimics the initial transaction. In so doing, the context (the one who is speaking) has changed, and each time the act is translated, it not only (re)creates that event, but it also simultaneously changes the reporter’s relationship to the end product. In other words, the Stenomask or Sylencer blurs the distinction between listener, author and inscriber by rendering the process of inscription invisible.

The repetition involved in using the Stenomask, then, seems to have more in common with performance than it does with writing. Michelle Kasprzak, a performance artist, has capitalized on the poetics of repetition and devotion by using the Stenomask in a performance entitled “Lecture Machine.” In her performance, Kasprzak uses the Stenomask to investigate the relationship between technology and the human voice. By posing the question “who is training who,” (21) her “Lecture Machine” elucidates the communication slippages between humans and machines, but also specifically in how it relates to voice-writing: “For the computer and the user to function as a team,” Kasprzak states, “repetition of voice training and perfection in enunciation work in concert to ensure the fewest possible error” (7).

Performance artist Michelle Kasprzak with Stenomask

What is perhaps most useful to this study, however, is Kasprzak’s encounter with the Stenomask in relation to the law and where “the reporter,” she writes, “holds the knowledge, the Stenomask and the computer hold the power” (13). This division of power and knowledge is particularly interesting when one considers other models of dictation. In the court stenographer model, for instance, the knowledge and the power both funnel into the transcription. Often taken to be the guardian of the truth, the stenographer (as guardian and author of the transcript), holds both the power and the knowledge in a manner that is unlike that of the Stenomasked transcript.

Finally, it will prove fruitful to wonder: who holds agency over the text in the Sylencer/Stenomask transcription/transaction? Another manner of staging the question would be to consider what the relationship between word and deed in the stenographed version of a transcription is, and how the relationship between word and deed changes in relation to the phenomenology of voice. Finally, to what degree does the implementation of a voice-writer affect the malleability of the word, particularly in relation to the change between the Edisonian Voicewriter and the subsequent voice-recognition software that is employed with the Stenomask?

An interview with Michelle Kasprzak on “Lecture Machine.”

Works Cited

Kasprzak, Michelle. “La perte de sens à partir à partir de la plasticité de la voix dans une pratique de manipulation technologique.” Diss. Université du Québec à Montréal, 2006.

Flusser, Villem. “The Gesture of Writing.”

McCaffery, Steve and bpNichol. Rational Geomancy: The kids of the Book-Machine. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992.

— Genevieve Robichaud