Last Visit Practitioner Lecture of the semester.
I will be mentioning two of the pieces presented that strongly correlate to the subject of my current research.
From French Through Spanish
‘Using a language translator application, I pronounce a phrase in French and listen to the corresponding word in Spanish. Then, I repeat the same sentence in Spanish, whereas the traducer is programmed in the French to Spanish mode. The application is making a circle, traducing its own traductions and creating new sentences from the machine. With this experience, like a modern Chinese Whispers game (including the influence of my own pronunciation), I want to see how a machine reacts with a non-sens sentence, and how the application is doing links between two languages.’
An interaction between both languages, the machine and herself, continuously translating each other.
The Voice Is Voices
It’s like this class was curated for my audio paper.
“You enter a space containing two voices: one human and the other, its synthesized clone. The artificial voice has been constructed from a vocal corpus of many hours of recordings, and each word is generated completely by the machine, via text-to-speech synthesis. Feel free to meander around the sonic space… try to listen and feel the in-between — this distance from the original voice to its simulated twin.”
Presented as a multichannel installation.
I have been looking for ways to clone my voice online for the past few days/weeks. It’s something I was very keen on using in my audio paper. I could not find anything usable and affordable yet. For this project, Melia worked with IRCAM who used hours of recordings of her voice reading Wikipedia pages to train the synthesized voice. However, there is no executable available of this algorithm they used. It is based on concatenative synthesis. It separates the phonemics in categories (vowels, consonants, mouth noises). This allowed her to play with mouth clicks and noises as well to control the how organic/inorganic the sound feels.
She did recommend a website called Respeecher: https://marketplace.respeecher.com/ which I will be looking into.