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This chapter attempts to examine the ethical relationship between self and other by way of focusing on the theme of estrangement in the New Hong Kong Cinema. In his study of the voice-over in cinema, Michel Chion creates a category of “acousmatic voices” or in French the acousmêtre. The acousmêtre refers to the image-voice relation in which one does not see the person one hears. Chion observes that sound film began with visualized sound but very soon it tried to experiment with acousmatic sound—voices without images, or voices divorced from images. These are not the voices of the disembodied, detached voice-over like that of documentary films because they have no personal stake in the film. This area of research has filled a lacuna in the study of cinema because the voice has often been considered as an inseparable and natural part of the image and thus it has seldom been examined as an independent category.

This chapter, which focuses on podcasts and the way they revive the participatory nature and programming diversity of radio before it evolved into music formats, explores how podcasting distributes the voice in a novel way that extends voices—and voice performances in particular—through space and potentially through time. It argues that one of the key attributes of podcasting which may be considered truly new and even revolutionary is its ability to create a new and extended sphere for the performance of the essentially acousmatic voice. Acousmatic voice refers to the transmission and reception of voices (people and things) while their origin remains invisible. After providing a short genealogy of podcasting, the chapter considers the phenomenon within the history of the technologizing of the voice: Its “faithful” and playful recording, reproduction, and distribution. It then looks at the potential of the digitized podcast voice by surveying recent applications of podcasting in various forms, including public radio.

Anna Sigg, in this chapter, argues that in Embers Beckett represents trauma most of all through bodily internal sea sounds. This radio play effectively ‘blinds’ its listener and places him in a mental cave. Embers focuses on Henry, who is tortured by a roaring ‘tinnitus’, an internal sea-like sound, which reminds him of the death of his father and his own mortality. This chapter illuminates the connection between Henry’s loss and the listener’s perception of the ‘tinnitus’ by drawing on Mladen Dolar’s idea of the acousmatic object voice and Jacques Lacan’s concept of objet petit a. Henry’s ‘tinnitus’, Sigg argues, is a bodily object voice manifesting an uncanny intimation of the unconscious. It expresses Henry’s mourning and his confrontation with mortality, while also generating countermelodies to the traumatic losses inside the listener’s head.