Living Art: Speech Drum
For my Living Art midterm project, I'm building an audio version of the Text Drum, a device I'm building for my thesis. Here's how it works: you "play" a series of words from an audio recording by hitting a drum. If you keep a steady beat, the samples play in the order they occur in the source file. If you syncopate or fall out of step with the rhythm, the order of the words gets jumbled; the more out of synch you get, the more random the order of the words seems.
I have a software prototype ready, which I'll present in class tomorrow. A Processing sketch waits for input from the keyboard, compares it against prescheduled actions, and sends the "score" (how close you got to the beat) to ChucK using OSC.
Download an MP3 excerpted from a short performance with the drum here.
The source audio is sixty or so words excerpted from an audiobook I had sitting around. The text in question is Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. Download an MP3 of the excerpt here.