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)
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