The Quest to Save the Most Precious Voices on Earth
“My whole world is the human voice,” says Harry Yeff. And he isn’t just referring to his previous life as a champion beatboxer (alias Reeps One). Yeff is also a digital artist, and he has traveled the world meeting experts and artists who share his obsession. He’s spent the past five years collecting, he explains, the most precious voices on Earth.
The motivation for his project is a simple fact: Every day, voices that could be preserved go extinct—whether that be the call of a critically endangered bird or a digital voice note lost in a phone update. That’s why Yeff and his collaborator Trung Bao created Voice Gems: a project that uses AI to shape iconic and endangered voices into digital gemstones and physical sculptures. These AI-generated gems are not just a random visualization: A voice with a lower resonance will take on a deep blueish quality; a