The start of reading aloud practices?

Reading Gitelman’s book caused me to do a few random things – such as watch ‘My Fair Lady.’ I felt the inking to watch sound machines in use, and then spent time analyzing the place of the technology in Eliza’s life. Eliza is able to move up the cultural ladder from a flower girl to high society by having her voice recorded, listening to her voice, and then matching pitches so to change her dialect. I am assuming we all know the plot of the movie, so I am not going to go into much detail about what happens. I was surprised to read about the phonograph and other “talking technologies” in court rooms and business settings, and no by linguistics, such as Mr. Higgins. Wouldn’t this be around the same time the International Phonetic Alphabet is being developed? To me, it would just make sense for the linguists to want this piece of technology. I know it isn’t exactly what Gitelman was getting at in her text, but I thought it was an interesting connection between the book and the use of the technology in a popular film.

What I have really been thinking about was mentioned on page 145, “For the first time reading aloud was explicitly severed from the human subject.” I was thinking about how writers’ read their papers aloud to catch their own errors. We can ‘hear’ if something is wrong with our writing. Our voice becomes severed from us in a way that we don’t hear our voice per se, but we hear our words and are able to catch ourselves. It is almost as though our voice becomes some sort of an object, we are listening to a recording of our voice, when really it is in real time. I was wondering if maybe this practice, or the idea for this practice, came from these new technologies. That practitioners realized the benefits of these voice recording machines, and extended the concepts to just reading their own work aloud? I know that in the Writing Center the reading aloud practice is used in pretty much every session, yet little if any research has been done on reading aloud. It just seems to be a practice that we accept. We know it works, so we do it. But why does it work? How does hearing our work help us catch mistakes that we wouldn’t catch if we silently read to ourselves? Could the shift to the phonographs/gramophones as “talking machines” be the framework (or maybe just the start of the practice) of the reading aloud practice? If someone was to trace the practice of reading papers aloud, is this where that person would find the beginning? Does it make sense that this could be the beginning? It is necessarily the main shift from literate to oral, but it a shift as though literate and oral are becoming more like one. With these new technologies, you are now able to speak and have that spoken language recorded down, and played back – which from reading the text changed the way things worked. Just some ideas I was playing with.