Reading voice
Type
Interactive installation
Tools
Python/TouchDesigner
Commissioned by
Tao G. Vhrovec Sambolec
Eye tracking sonic experience
Reading Voice is an installation that explores the zone between, on the one hand, a spoken word as an event in time, and, on the other, a written word as an object in space. The cognitive activity of reading is disrupted and various spaces of encounter are staged between the reading body and the written text. Central to the installation is a booth for a single viewer with a digital screen displaying text, an eye tracker, and custom software that sonifies the reader’s gaze by instantly sounding phonemes they look at. This process unsettles the established relations between the voice, looking, written words, and meaning.
Commisioned by with Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec
Slovenian audiovisual artist Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec commissioned me to program software capable of performing real-time eye-tracking and phoneme analysis alignment of arbitrary recordings of speech. I created a system that captures a user’s sight and aligns the obtained attributes with the index of an FFT file for resynthesis, allowing one to “playback” the phonemes of a sound file, purely with one’s eyes. The audio part of the software was developed in collaboration with Giuliano Anzani.
The installation was developed at the Lab for Unstable Media V2_ in Rotterdam.