Spiel, patter or sound effect: Tracking the residual voice on the travelling fun fair

The travelling fun-fair, emerging from trade and hiring fairs prior to the twentieth century, is a beguiling and uncharted realm of illusion, deception, thrill and adventure. It offers a glimpse of the improbable and impossible, and a taste or touch of the unattainable. There is an immediate and overwhelming polysensory overload, of sight, of sound, light, smell, disorientation, performance and serendipitous sociality. This article tracks the voice on the travelling fun-fair and asks whether the contemporary situation, examining two specific examples of voice, is a continuation or break with tradition. The voice is approached through a nested consideration of the overall experience, the cacophonous soundscape (music, scream, mechanical noise), and finally a totality of voices as an element within the soundscape. This phenomenological approach – from the point of view of the ‘punter’ – is then balanced with a historical consideration of the showperson’s voice. These two approaches are then combined to examine the continuity of cultural tradition.