Speech drum
From my ITP blog:
For my Living Art midterm project, I’m building an audio version of the Text Drum, a device I’m building for my thesis. Here’s how it works: you “play” a series of words from an audio recording by hitting a drum. If you keep a steady beat, the samples play in the order they occur in the source file. If you syncopate or fall out of step with the rhythm, the order of the words gets jumbled; the more out of synch you get, the more random the order of the words seems.
Download an MP3 excerpted from a short performance with the drum here.
The source audio is sixty or so words excerpted from an audiobook I had sitting around. The text in question is Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Download an MP3 of the excerpt here.
I have some sample output from the text-based version of this program that I’ll post shortly. I’m actually surprised at how aesthetically different the jumbled sound is from the jumbled text. More experimentation is needed!
The biggest challenge of this project, unsurprisingly, was not writing the software, but segmenting the source audio into words. (Someday I’m gonna get me an intern.)
