This repository contains notebooks and utility scripts for a lecture-workshop. Held at: AI Anarchies School, Art Meets Radical Openness
‟I call my vocal condition experimental: every day, every encounter is an experiment where my voice, once a constant in my self-conception, is now a variable.” [1]
This lecture-workshop introduces participants to the use of voice in machine learning systems. Through a mix of theoretical discussion and practical computing exercises, we will critically explore the legacy of vocal forensics, tackling the use of the voice as a tool for profiling and measurement as well as exploring the space for an ‟experimental vocal practice” capable of troubling the assumed relationship between speech, subjectivity and the body that AI systems seek to reify. Participants explore how aesthetic practices can be used as part of an investigative method that opens up computational systems to sociotechnical concerns. We will take Jonathan Sterne’s account of a ‟crip vocal technoscience” as a starting point to explore methods that complicate the easy relationship between interiority and exteriority, and build an adversarial approach to vocal acoustics. No programming experience is necessary for this session.
[1] Sterne, J., 2019. ‟Ballad of the dork-o-phone: Towards a crip vocal technoscience”. Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, 4(2), pp.179-189.