Artificial Intelligence and Voice
Lead Research Organisation:
Royal College of Art
Department Name: School of Communications
Abstract
AI personal assistants have been almost exclusively assigned female voices. For example, Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Echo. Yet, their vocal utterances were not aiming to be exactly human-like, deliberately allowing for glitches in intonation and pitch that give away their machinic quality. This continues a tradition in the use of female voices assigned to serving machines across the history of technology and communication, raising important questions about gender and feminism in relation to automation. With the development of new digital assistants and their ability to switch between female and male voices, as well as the perfecting of their fluency and human-ness in their articulations and interactions with humans, the voice and technology debate could be said to stretch from feminism and gender specificity, on the one side, to questions to do with voice-based human-machine interrelations and their implications.
As AI devices develop human-like vocal accuracy, a new set of cultural, social, ethical, artistic and philosophical questions and implications begin to emerge: How such a technology might confuse and undermine voice-based verification systems? In an era of fake news, how does it complicate further existing cultural ideas about sources of information. How will users interact with the technology and what new creative processes, artistic responses and forms of sociability will develop from this interaction? How much will users trust it and what kind of new fears, paranoias will it inflict? This proposed project will research innovative methods by which the arts and humanities might address contemporary cultural processes about new forms of interaction between humans and machines as AI technology enters a new stage of vocal indistinguishability between them.
Supported by the TECHNE National Productivity Investment Fund (NPIF) AHRC Scholarship the Royal College of Art in partnership with IBM's iX lab is looking to award a PhD studentship to explore these issues of new communication interactions drawing on a methodology that relies on a combination of art, design and computer science approaches. In this research by practice, coding and predictive practices underpinning all voice systems will be subject to critical enquiry.
As AI devices develop human-like vocal accuracy, a new set of cultural, social, ethical, artistic and philosophical questions and implications begin to emerge: How such a technology might confuse and undermine voice-based verification systems? In an era of fake news, how does it complicate further existing cultural ideas about sources of information. How will users interact with the technology and what new creative processes, artistic responses and forms of sociability will develop from this interaction? How much will users trust it and what kind of new fears, paranoias will it inflict? This proposed project will research innovative methods by which the arts and humanities might address contemporary cultural processes about new forms of interaction between humans and machines as AI technology enters a new stage of vocal indistinguishability between them.
Supported by the TECHNE National Productivity Investment Fund (NPIF) AHRC Scholarship the Royal College of Art in partnership with IBM's iX lab is looking to award a PhD studentship to explore these issues of new communication interactions drawing on a methodology that relies on a combination of art, design and computer science approaches. In this research by practice, coding and predictive practices underpinning all voice systems will be subject to critical enquiry.
Title | Acoustic Ecology of an AI System |
Description | Online interactive audio experience. |
Type Of Art | Artwork |
Year Produced | 2020 |
Impact | Connected with new audiences and networks of practitioners outside the UK. Also included a live performance in Berlin. |
URL | https://attune.researchandwaves.net/acoustic-ecology-of-an-ai-system.html |
Title | Multiphonic Connections |
Description | Interactive audio telephone experience |
Type Of Art | Artwork |
Year Produced | 2020 |
Impact | Impact on a wide audience about themes of future and speculative listening. Primary research from the public collected about their thoughts for speculative listening devices. |
URL | https://empathyloading.com/ |
Description | Art/Thought/Sound: Knowing Through Sound |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
Results and Impact | Repeatedly untamed, sound remains as an active agent suited to bathe, modulate, probe and infect. It is a permanently open and involuntary external signal sensed through an auditory system that receives it effortlessly, providing a constant three-dimensional perception and navigation abilities. Its volatility as matter marks a platform of interference with the world or of production of worlds. Such condition renders sound as a paradoxical figure floating between the possibilities of an ethereal state, one that refuses medium specificities beyond its own; and the practicalities of its parasitic behaviour, one defined by a continued palpable involvement with surrounding materials. It is precisely in this internal oscillation that sound finds its validation as an epistemological instrument, expanding its operational capabilities into fields of speculation and deviation, a procedure that manifests itself in the sonification of data, in the construction of sonic ecologies, in the reconfiguration and reevaluation of categories, in questioning and testing of social, cultural, environmental and artistic contracts, in mapping, rendering and establishing invisible territories, in the overall reconstitution of itself as a modality and experience of knowledge. In 2021, the School of Arts - UCP Open Lectures Programme aims to approach sound as a set of practices that can emerge, lead to or simply make use of sound as a world-building tool in politics, philosophy, geography, engineering, poetry, ecology and art. As such, a group of guests, among artists, researchers, and performers, from different contexts and geographies will gather in order to explore a transversal profile of sound as a functional instrument in contemporary culture. Curators: Diogo Tudela and José Alberto Gomes |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
URL | https://artes.porto.ucp.pt/pt/aulasabertas?msite=10 |
Description | Auraldiversities: Session 6 - Future Listening |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Online presentation as part of Auraldiversities: Session 6 - Future Listening about Speculative Listening. A year-long programme addressing the 'auraldiverse turn' in Arts and Humanities research and theory, questioning how and what we hear, what we listen to and why, as situated within our contemporary milieu: that of ecological, existential, social, economic and epidemiological crises. Entwined with sonically sensile organisms, sessions extend well beyond human worlds into speculative acoustic realms of future listening. Funded by Chase in partnership with Goldsmiths University and University of Sussex. Curated by: John Drever, Alice Eldridge and Helen Frosi. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
URL | https://www.chase.ac.uk/events-1/zyy47f6ct3ftkoci72efmlh59w22sb |
Description | Looking Back and Looking Forward, Sound Practise and Research, City, University of London |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | SPARC: Looking Forward Wednesday 9 June 2021, 15:30-17:30 We will consider how the enforced move to online dissemination/sharing of work may shape the future of artistic practice beyond the pandemic, also in light of Brexit. Panel Guests: Amina Abbas-Nazari (designer, performer; Research Fellow, Royal College of Art) Igor Toronyi-Lalic (Artistic Director, London Contemporary Music Festival) Laura Ducceschi (creative, curator, producer) Chair: Dr Claudia Molitor |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
URL | https://www.city.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/2021/06/sparc |
Description | SPARC Symposium 2019: Land Music |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | 12 - 14 September 2019 City, University of London & IKLECTIK Ecological thinking, beyond the conventional understanding of environment, asks us to consider new ways of imagining how we conceive of and consider the world. As Donna Haraway writes, "[] another world is not only urgently needed, it is possible, but not if we are ensorcelled in despair, cynicism, or optimism, and the belief/disbelief discourse of progress." The third SPARC Symposium will consider this shift in thinking through the lens of sound practice from a variety of perspectives from artists and theorists who consider how to respond to this moment of crisis. Invited participants include: Cathy Lane, Mariam Rezaei, Amina Abbas-Nazari, Tanya Auclair, Joe Browning, Lily Green, Tonia Ko, Clare Qualmann, Cathy Lane, Sam Lee, Sylvia Lim, Heloise Tunstall-Behrens, Aaron Einbond, Matilde Meireles, Cath Roberts, Benedict Taylor, David Toop, Nell Catchpole, Leo Chadburn, Jan Hendrickse, Amber Priestley, Georgina Born |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
URL | https://sparc.london/land-music |
Description | Speculative Listening at Life Rewired Hub, Barbican Centre |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | Inspired by and responding to our cross-arts season, Life Rewired, the Life Rewired Hub is our new pop-up space on Level G Hosting a programme of talks, performances, workshops, and residencies, this flexible new structure invites audiences to engage with the dizzying impact of technological and scientific change on what it means to be human today. In addition to this events programme, the Hub will be home to an exhibition which presents new writing and short films from artists and thinkers who are navigating the complex, vast, and all-too-often confusing discourse taking place around the impact of technology on our lives. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
URL | https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2019/series/life-rewired-hub |
Description | Speculative Listening at Tate Summer School |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Third sector organisations |
Results and Impact | Considering broad ideas around art, education and the twenty first century museum in this week long course for teachers and artists. Summer School 2019 is an immersive course exploring learning through making. Contribute to an evolving, experiential and participatory conversation around new approaches to teaching and learning in the classroom over a full week at Tate Modern. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
URL | https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/course/summer-school-2019 |