There are one or two things which stood out to me in listening to these very different approaches to sound art, ways to characterize the relationship between the source text and its repurposing. One is the relationship or attitude towards the appropriated text itself — clearly the Reagan piece seems to be making a stronger gesture towards a political statement than Son of Strelka, Son of God’s use of Obama’s voice; even though I looked around and saw that the artist did intend for it to be a commentary on Obama’s elevated style of rhetoric and around the near-Messianic resonance his campaign and early presidency gained for his followers. I wouldn’t have necessarily guessed that, though; it could have been merely using Obama for the aural qualities of his voice or for its recognizability. Even the titles point out this type of difference, it seems.

The other is whether anything remains intelligible of the source material in the way it’s meant to be; here it seems clear that Charles Hardy is a public historian whereas the other sound artists here are not, because although his work mixes and recontextualizes stories, it does so in a way that preserves (parts of) the original stories. Having read his article first, and having listened to Kahn and Warren’s work, I would have expected a more thorough cutting-up of the stories, even if the narratives remained clear, but instead we hear whole chunks with aural texture added and positioned against each other for narrative effect. This form of use distributes the stories from these aural histories to, assumably, a broader audience than it would otherwise receive (although maybe that’s a faulty assumption, since oral history projects seem to be gaining a lot of traction and popularity, in terms of distribution and listenership, in the age of the podcast.)
I’m not sure whether there’s an actual ethical claim here — it sounds like I’m making one implicitly, but I want to back off from that a little — but it’s the thing that comes to mind listening to all of those things against each other. How would the original subjects view this use of their words? And if there is an ethical question at all, it seems absent anyway in using a president or other public figure’s words, so I don’t quite have material to contrast it with. The other project that I’m familiar with along these lines, John Boswell’s Symphony of Science, similarly doesn’t (I think) ever use the original voices/clips in a way the authors would disapprove of, and in fact expresses a similar goal as the original materials (exposing a popular audience to the wonders of science) using a different approach. “The wonders of science” sounds very nerdy, now that I write it out, but it’s worth checking out — or his PBS remixes, if you prefer Mr. Rogers to Carl Sagan.