Changes

Finally, I need to address sonic properties of the piece and its time course as a composition. The voice of the viewer as they speak into the microphone is one sound source in the system, and the receipt printer has a very assertive (and retro) dot-matrix-ey sound as it prints out text and cuts rolls of paper. I need to make some decisions about how to use the sounds of the speaker and the printer over the course of the piece. Also, will I add in additional sound sources such as more printers, pre-recorded voices, voices of past participants, or processed sounds? There are additional possibilities here for rhythmic exchanges between the percussive sound of the printer and the speaker, for long pauses, silences, and repetitions. Additionally, I need to establish some overall arc for the piece--does an encounter with the system travel through to one pre-ordained conclusion? Are there multiple branching possibilities that change depending on what the viewer says and how they respond to the printouts? Finally there is a relationship to be explored between speech as text and speech as sound--a parallel to the roles of printing as text and printing as sound. The fundamental distinctions between text, sound, and speech as kinds of communication and expression can be ripe territory for exploration. I suspect that these conceptual and compositional questions will occupy most of my time this quarter and comprise the bulk of the work that I need to do.

The most obvious technical challenges I foresee at this point are the implementation of sound input and pre-processing with supercollider, and interfacing from supercollider to the speech recognition library and receipt printer. As part of this project is a critical investigation of the strengths and limitations of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, I intend to get more involved with the internal mechanisms of speech recognition as implemented in the Sphinx-4 library. A more comprehensive understanding of that technology is necessary to figure out how to tweak it and expose its internal character and assumptions.