related to the installations themselves through people knocking
on the doors as they recorded or scraping the stainless-steel speaker
grilles. In this way the work chronicled both its social and physical
surrounds. Individuals made creative use of the work adding many
nonverbal sounds such as mobile phone tones and the sound of portable
CD players.
Technical Notes:
Summoned Voices consists of multiple installations each with a computer
and sound system within a chamber at the rear of the door. All computers
are connected on a LAN. When the intercom button is pressed the
computer records and analyses the sound, saving the audio data as
a file and the analysis data to tables in a database on a server
computer. The analysis involves segmen- tation of the audio into
bursts at various resolutions - corresponding roughly to sentences,
phrases and words or parts of words. These segments are then ana-
lysed for a variety of characteristics such as the
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duration, median pitch, the pitch envelope and spectral charac-
teristics. The computer also determines higher-level characteristics
such as whether the recording represents: singing, slow speech,
fast speech, whistling and so on. Once this data is saved on the
server, the local computer then constructs a search strategy. This
is performed on the basis of these high-level findings to find matches
for each voice segment within the analysis database of previous
recordings. It then loads the appropriate portions of audio files
from the server into memory and plays the audio through the sound
system using a variety of synthesis algorithms. Sum- moned Voices
was programmed in C on Linux and used the sound language Pd and
the database PostgreSQL along with a variety of scripts and utilities."
(Iain
Mott, Marc Raszewski)
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