​What does a voice actually look like? Artist Giovanna Iorio explores the relationship between the audio and the image of that voice, stunningly rendered in the form of spectrograms.

What is a Voice Portrait?
A voice portrait is the portrait of a voice.
How do you make a voice portrait?
Starting with a sound track of a few minutes I produce the spectrogram.

So what is a spectrogram?
A spectrogram is the fingerprint of a voice. It’s a graph that makes the voice visible.

It seems simple… But the colours? Where do they come from?
Colours are the result of a complicated algorithm that studies tones and nuances. Then there are also aesthetic choices and reworking. To give you an example: I immerse the voice in a kind of dark room in which I dive sounds. The result is spectacular.

How do you feel when you make a portrait of a voice?
It makes me feel very good to create portraits of the voices. It is as if a person’s soul materialises before my eyes. I’m going to produce portraits of all the poets of the past that I love, to see the shape and colours of their voices.

What do you do with the portraits?
I try to show them: in the UK we are at the second exhibition. In Italy in January the exhibition was in Salerno. In Spring an exhibition here in the UK…in Hertford.

What if VP become very popular? What do you think?
I think that spreading poetry and voice portraits satisfies me deeply.



Giovanna Iorio is an Italian-born, London-based artist who sees art as a bridge between sound, memory, and human connection. In her work she explores the emotional power of voices. She has collaborated with internationally acclaimed artists and musicians, seeking synergies between different artistic languages. She is also the founder of the Poetry Sound Library, an interactive world map preserving the voices of poets, past and present. Her renowned project, Voice Portraits, transforms poets’ voices into visual spectrograms, allowing viewers to listen with their eyes. Exhibited internationally, these works combine audio and visuals, often accessible via QR codes linked to the Poetry Sound Library.
Her interdisciplinary projects include Talking Chairs, featuring transparent chairs embedded with poets’ voices, Back to Analog, which explores poetry’s return to vinyl and Voice of Trees, geolocated sound walks that bring poetry to nature, turning trees and parks into immersive installations.

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