In my recent office hours, One strong topic came to me strong as Andrew provided the idea of Robert Irwin Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (This particular video I found about Robert Irwin mentioning to alter the situation and perception, which is relevant to my work). With further research of the artist, his Light & Space provided me with a moment of presence and ever-changing experience, it’s like a man encounters his own voice agely and contextually. It’s revealing and poetic as an expression that I would like to provide to my audience. I would also like to mention that Kristin Linklater and Tadashi Suzuki will be my future references in the area of voice exercising and training.

Early this week I started by looking at Kristin’s voice training video to get a sense of how to release one’s own natural sound. I will be attempting to following along to feel the voice “in” my body an embodied exercise, however the language difference could be a barrier to my understanding to the essence of her accomplished work, but we shall see. At the same time, after a brief study to Suzuki Method via a mix of videos on Youtube previously mentioned. As a layman of performance arts, I was fascinated by this method of bringing up sense of being presence and awareness by training with conditions via body movements and gesture. I believe embodied experiences are critical to my work and will be spread out to my continuous four threads researching, technology acquiring, expert interview, designing experiment.

In this week, I had a pleasure to talk to Ellen, Carrie and Ruta. I have found more researches that are helpful to expand my knowledge of voice and narrowing down my focus. One interesting read about Can You Still Hate The Sound Of Your Voice When It’s Your Profession? mentioned that in a 2013 study, researchers played recordings of 18 different voices to 80 students and asked them to rate each one on attractiveness. Unbeknownst to the participants, however, their own voice accounted for three of the recordings. Very few of them actually noticed that they were included in the series (generally, people are quite poor at voice recognition), and — blissfully unaware — most rated their own voice as being significantly more attractive than others’ voices. It has been one of the most interesting information in this week. I just felt it as a great example of the huge contradictions in human nature.

I have also found Your Voice Says a Lot About You and Synthetic voices as unique as fingerprints are informative and giving me clear ideas about voice and identity, voice and perception. In the former video, her description echos strongly to me about how we expect our voice to be – We want our voice to reflect our true us, congruent to our identity and reflect our strength. The study of voice and perception shows a correlation of perception of anxiety in voice, of not being strong, not being competent not being trustworthy. A total misperception from others with your voice that further builds the wall between us and our voice. In fact, to my personal experience, the more I devote myself in this topic the more I make it clear for myself that my negative voice perception of my own came from experiences of communications with my parents. This kind of perception will vary from case to case, person to person. I believe, as also Andrew suggested me as considering the first important question, is to make the gap to be perceivable to the audience. Furthermore, in order to get to the focus of my topic. Maybe be it’s worth to consider to neutralize the speech part of the voice such as language and prosody, which they produce an immediate effect to the listener. This could lead to a form of experiment on singing melody as voice input for example and be accumulated in a collective archive, such as in a metaphor of choir. But for now, I see the first experiment taking form in p5.speech, similar to one of Carries’s simple speech recognition sketch but in “soundfile” version(realtime voice recording instead of speech recognition). The idea is still vague and I am not very clear yet about the goal and user experience for this experiment yet.

 

Finally, my production timeline currently looks like this:

 

EXPERT INTERVIEWS wk8-wk11 – <professionals in healthcare/ psychology/ otolaryngologist as well as sound technologist/ audio engineer/ musician>

Currently one professional musician planned tmr but the rest is

 

TECH SCOUTING AND ACQUIRING wk8-wk11

I am currently studying p5.speech + rivescript(chatbot) and previously positional sound in three.js, coming up next, I see p5.soundfile could be helpful.

 

EXPERIMENTS wk8-wk12

I see the first experiment taking form similar to one of Carries’s simple speech recognition sketch but in “soundfile” version(realtime voice recording instead of speech recognition): https://editor.p5js.org/powenshih/sketches/QidqBFcBy

I have also consider to set different questionnaires for different experts as a form of experiments.

 

EDITING AND IMPROVING wk12-wk14

Conducting more experiments or focus on one and polish it