Made in collaboration with Nicolas A Pena-Escarpenier for the New Musical Instruments Hackathon – Oct 14, 2017.
For the New Musical Instrument Hackathon, Nicolas suggested we use computer generated voices that sing. I suggested that the voices respond to user input, resulting in a composition made by man and machine.
Nicolas was the primary coder and I helped research and troubleshoot. We came up with a list of words that the computer can sing back, juxtaposing mechanical aesthetic with playful and sometimes sexualized (even smutty!) language ("sexy" "all night long") with a hint of political satire "impeach me baby!". These are a work in progress! New words will be added.
Documentation
We used p5.Speech, which uses Google’s Speech Synthesis API. We used p5 js not javascript.
Here is Nicolas' documentation of the libraries we tried and ultimately settled on:
We also decided to visualize the interaction by making the sine waves move in response to the speech. They don't actually reflect the frequency or amplitude of the sounds, but serve as a visual representation of the man-machine dialogue.
To do next:
I'd like to create a brutalist style interface and edit the waves themselves to look more minimalist.
I plan on using CSS to edit the text box and button and create something like this, inspired by Things of Wonder:
