About | Work | C.V. | Misc. | Ack.

Work > Not Voice

11:36 color HD video with sound, 2009.

This piece was conceived as a live-coding audio performance, although it was finally executed as a single-channel video. It is a response to the Lettrist poetry of Isidore Isou and minimalist compositional techniques, especially the repetitive music of Philip Glass. The work was heavily influenced by Florain Cramer's essay, Words Made Flesh.

I wrote a series of context-sensitive grammars using the rmutt micro-language. These grammars produced strings of text representing english language phonemes using the text formats specified for input to Apple's voice synthesizer. Every sound is produced by the Apple voice synthesizer, post-processed to add reverb and dynamics compression. The video displays the complete code listing, line by line, as an extreme optical close-up of my laptop screen.

Many thanks to jonCates and Mary Patten.