Feature: A severed head and fatal sirens demonstrate mystical charm of voice

A severed head that can still sing, a disembodied mouth spitting out a staccato monologue of thoughts and the fatal charms of the Greek sirens are all brought together in a new exhibition.

The exhibition "This is a Voice" opened Thursday at the Wellcome Foundation in central London, where visitors are first met by the opposite of a voice -- an anechoic chamber which absorbs all sound, through which they have to pass to enter.

Barbara Rodriguez Munoz, exhibition curator explained that this chamber had two purposes: first, to absorb the considerable noise from the busy museum and from the traffic on the Euston Road outside, and second to concentrate the visitors' minds on the idea of sound.

The exhibition takes an eclectic and enlightening look at the human voice, with the deliberate intention of bringing together different disciplines, such as art and medicine to illuminate more about humanity's most complex form of communication.

A startling exhibit is a recording of Samuel Beckett's play "Not I", which features just a mouth, spouting forth a seemingly never-ending stream of words and ideas.

Munoz told Xinhua: "We decided to move away from the more traditional linguistic approach to the voice; to look at the voice before and beyond words; the melody of our voice -- tempo, pitch and tone -- but also gesture and expression and how that adds emphasis, or even contradicts, your words, and also non-verbal forms of communication like laughing and screaming and ... singing."

The exhibition is split into five parts, and it is the fifth and final part, the Unlocated Voice, which probes most into the darker areas of the voice.

Munoz said: "The earlier parts of the show were about the physicality of the voice, but the last section takes you to the unlocated voice, one where you cannot see its source of production. That is quite complex, but fascinating."

She added: "We bring together the Greek sirens, who could seduce sailors even though the sailors could not see the bodies of the sirens with things like the legend of Orpheus, whose head could continue singing even when separated from the body."

Alongside this is modern technology which can produce or synthesize its own speech, and perhaps most mysteriously the voice and god, with the intention of examining the experience of hearing voices that others cannot hear in a cultural context.

An example of the cultural context of religious writing are the medieval manuscripts from the 14th century of the Book of Margery Kempe" and the "Book of Julian of Norwich", written in 1395 and the first known written book by a woman in the English language, both of whom were mystics who claimed god had spoken to them.

Both books have been studied over the following centuries, by opponents and adherents, and by the religious and anti-religious, but it is the historical context rather than the strangeness of the experiences of these two women which is laid out in the exhibition.

"In those books they reveal their multi-sensory experiences communicating with god, but this idea of hearing voices is put in a different historical context, beyond the pathological," said Munoz.

The exhibition runs until the end of July at the Wellcome Collection in London, and travels to Sydney, Australia in 2017. Endit