Less Than What’s Not There (Courtney) presents a conversation between two people, wherein a generic computer text-to-speech synthesizer supplants the voice of one converser. This piece forefronts a wholesale subtraction of imagined timbral, intonational, and articulative nuance inherent to the male’s missing original voice, without altering the semantic content of the dialog. It is a self-negating move, reflective of an absent self which is now somehow less than itself; a fundamental lack that is accentuated by the unique signature of the untouched female voice. The subtraction of personal sonic signifiers that (we imagine) characterize the male voice is a minimal intervention that rips open a void, which was always-already present, between the subject of the missing voice (the enunciation) and the subject of the dialog (the enunciated). As a result of this intervention the conversation's digressions into absurd topics, such as wizards, tepees, drunk girls, etc., ring with an air of distance, loss, and illusion beyond the formal contingency of the events discussed and the interaction itself. Beyond the surface of conversation, the listener encounters and identifies that which is not present, as that which never wholly is.