Speculative designer, Marguerite Humeau's presentation looked at the possibilities of reviving sounds of extinct animals by reconstructing their vocal tract that was developed during her Master's in Design Interactions at Royal College of Art Design (2009-2011).
Marguerite's self-described "obsessional expedition" involving "the fictional potential of scientific experiments" was initiated through discussions with various experts that included palaeontologists, zoologists and radiologists. Drawing inspiration from images of skulls and CT scans of larynxes, vocal tracts, she developed 3D sculptural prototypes that utilised data that could reproduce the vocal sounds of prehistoric animals.
The project attempts in part to follow scientific evidence and approximations by collecting scans of animals similar to those extinct (e.g. a baby elephant).
Following the first successful transplantation of human larynx which opened the question of whose voice the reciever would have...it turned out that the majority of the sound is defined by the oral cavity and this further helped direct her work. Some interesting questions from the audience related to this aspect: Are you not generalising a whole specie by giving it only one voice...?