Last Friday was an exciting day where I got to speak to four itp artists, friends, faculty and alums for 20mins each. It wasn’t successful in terms of time management because I spent much time going through presentation, plus my morning speech obstacle. However, as feedback session went, I came to speak less about my topic and allowed free conversations and association with my topic which was great to me.

There are a couple of important notes that I wanted to put in this journal. In the first two sessions, we talked about goal, making playful voiced sound with MAX and the process and duration of this experiment. My original idea was to speculate a journey to where people will eventually accept their voice. With her demonstration of making voiced sound (like simple beatbox elements), I see one path of enabling non-speech voiced sound playground to explore possibilities. In the second session, I was reminded that the experiments (#1 & #2) will come to its most meaningful only when being tested by the users. The sharing of exposure therapy and a discussion in thinking about the work process, it could be almost certain that a transformational process is needed in my user journey, not an intimidating one for sure.

In the later sessions that I gained so much great conceptual ideas about voice by first presenting my work in a shorter version, which is great. Many of them are so interesting that could lead to various single projects. For example, how does the disgust link to mental statement? How do we reconcile a moment when the disgust is gone? from a social rewarding perspective through the reaction of others seems to be a daily example we can approach. In the third session, we briefly touch upon layered voice sound back in the 60’s recording after reviewing my #2 experiment together. We had a similar opinion (more research needed here) on the necessary of layered voice in recording and tend to believe it recreates nuances of human face to face speaking experience, it touches our senses.

As approaching to the end of the day, I will first make this post short and come back to more feedbacks, especially from Eric Parren who spent time with me on various topic and process of my thesis. Meanwhile, through his introduction I found musical illusions and phantom words and I am sitting in a room super inspiring in sound and perception.

As I am setting up using Loopback to allow zoom attendees to experience their changed voiced sound, some of my recent rapid experiment play testing feedbacks are:

  • Felt the weight of speaking and listening to a changed voiced sound while speaking
  • Wanting to speak slow in order to hear her own changed voiced sound
  • Suggest to have a delay in order to hear her voice
  • The environment is important, if effect is certainly stronger when the changed voiced sound is louder (noise cancelling)
#2 experiment setup for zoom play testing
#2 experiment setup for zoom play testing

I truly appreciate and enjoy talking to Ellen, Ruta, Carrie, Craig, Eric and Andrew’s office hours as they all support me in different helpful ways.