Jenni Lauwrens presented a paper at the MediaArtHistories conference which was held in Aalborg, Denmark from 19-23 August 2019. The theme of the conference was RE:SOUND and the title of her paper was Engineering Empathy Through the Power of Voice.

The paper analysed Candice Breitz’s sound-based artwork entitled Love Story (2016) which was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2017. This seven-channel video installation explored contemporary stories of migration in western countries. Viewers could sit in front of any of the six monitors arranged in a dark room, put on a pair of headphones and listen to stories of persecution and violence as told by the victims who had been filmed sitting in front of a green screen. However, the only way to enter this room was through another larger room which contained a large screen and a seating area for viewers. On this screen, two familiar Hollywood stars told horrific stories of torture, abuse and discrimination, acting out the stories of the ‘real’ migrants. Unlike the second room, where the stories could only be heard on the headphones, the actors’ voices could be heard even before entering the room. In fact, it was the recognisability of Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin’s voices that caught the audiences’ attention (and imagination) even before they could hear the details of what these celebrities were saying.

The human voice is a powerful vehicle of social and affective communication. When compared with other sense modalities, the voice is a dynamic and accurate conveyor of emotion via speech content (what is said) as well as linguistic and paralinguistic cues (how it is said). The paper used the lens of empathy theory to explore the ways in which Breitz’s artwork engineered empathic responses in its audience by specifically focussing on how voice can manipulate emotional reactions. Lauwrens was particularly interested in why it is that we are more empathically moved by the stories re-narrated by the fictional characters than by those told by the actual victims.