There is no ideal speaker

"There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community."
                                                                                                      - Deleuze & Guattari, 1980.

-There is no ideal speaker, which is to say that there are only real ones, so that a pronunciation is compared with others, without leading to a big Other as a final referent.

-This means: no ideal speaker equals all are ideal speakers. Another way to say this is that there are just differences, no superintending identity for comparison for pronunciation and articulation. Second, variation in speech still preserves a statistical fuzzy domain for specific sounds which allow us to distinguish one from another. For example, /t/ and /x/ in Texas. No matter how it is said, these two letters are kept distinct, even if the vowels are pronounced in various subtle ways. Individual sounds are averages in relation to their surrounding sounds, which are also averages of other sounds in memory.

-When we listen or speak, there must be a process where we eliminate “noise” and abstract the “ideal” sound image or representation, so that every moment is like a test, a re-evaluation of the rapport in the mapping between phonic and graphic morphemic representation. The notion of high fidelity in sound recording would require a method of reducing noise and distortion in the recording, and what is defined as hi-fi would depend on what frequencies are defined to be within it. The aim is a neutral or flat unbiased recording of the targeted frequencies.

-However, registration does not end with the data, but must be played in various conditions and heard subjectively, so that remediation always results in tiny variations, similar to DNA from one person to another, or like fingerprints. There are many aspects of the voice which cannot be transcribed, such as the difference between masculine and feminine, infantine or gerontological voices. This is how we know the concept of individual discrete sounds is an abstraction.

-For we only happen to cross paths with the infinitely slow. Nothing of its ever unfolding but a tiny fraction registers itself through us.