Direct voice mediumship distinguished itself from ordinary trance mediumship by claiming the spirit voice was heard independently in the room, not spoken through the medium's own mouth in an altered manner, and nineteenth-century practitioners often used a lightweight metal or cardboard cone, the spirit trumpet, said to help the voice manifest and, in darkened séances, reported to move and float unaided as further proof no human hand was involved.
The most celebrated twentieth-century direct voice medium was Leslie Flint, a British practitioner active from the 1930s into the 1980s, who performed hundreds of documented sittings, including for some public figures and researchers, claiming to produce recognisable voices of the deceased, sometimes recorded on tape, while his own mouth was taped shut or otherwise restrained by sitters to rule out ordinary speech. Flint's recordings and reputation made direct voice one of the more persistently discussed physical mediumship claims of the later twentieth century, well after most other séance-room phenomena, table tipping, ectoplasm, spirit photography, had already largely faded from serious public and scientific attention entirely.