In this interactive installation, the children’s game “Chinese Whispers” (also known as “telephone”, “gossip”, “operator”, “messenger game”, “Stille Post”) – in which a message is whispered from one person to another – is performed with smartphones using the default speech recognition and speech synthesis software of the device’s operating system.
The often humorous altered last statement in the communication chain is a perfect metaphor for cumulative error caused by feedback. While the human brain lacks in recollection of spoken words and tends to complete or correct flawed information creatively, a similar process takes place in the pattern matching event of the speech analysis software.
This work is another attempt to explore computational creativity in an artistic manner.
Input:
“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you.” [1]
[1] ”Daisy Bell” is the first song performed by computer speech synthesis (IBM in 1961) as later referenced in Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey.