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              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 du-
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              ration, 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) |