issue 004
Issue 004 presents an interview between Joel Stern and journal editor Ruby O’Sullivan-Belfrage, accompanied by a soundscape response from Finn Arundel.
The conversation explores the way Stern uses AI generated sound in his work to probe the aesthetics and ethics of machine listening, especially in his ‘replicant karaoke’ experiments. BY creating a voice clone from a capella voice recordings of a specific artist singing a specific song, stern creates absurdist parodies of the originals on which the voice clones were trained.
Arundel’s accompanying piece processes individual words from the unedited interview transcript using a language sentiment dataset. Like a digital wind chime, musical tones are triggered whenever a targeted word falls into a specific sentiment category, such as anger, sadness, or joy, with each category corresponding to a unique note. Through this method, arundel is able to imitate an algorithm interpreting emotional content in a linguistic interaction. Arundel’s piece seeks to make audible invisible meaning-making structures and cultural influences that impact the AI algorithms we interact with everyday. The work echoes Stern’s ideas about mechanising the act of listening.
(No Brian Wilsons were harmed in the making of this issue).
Joel Stern is an artist, curator and researcher living in Naarm/Melbourne whose work focuses on practices of sound and listening and how these shape our contemporary worlds. Alongside fellow collaborators Sean Dockray and James Parker, Joel is Co-Lead on the Machine Listening project, a platform for collaborative research and artistic experimentation, focusing on the political and aesthetic dimensions of the computation of sound and speech. He is a Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow at RMIT School of Media and Communication, an Associate Investigator at ADM+S, and between 2013 and 2022 was the Artistic Director of Liquid Architecture.
Finn Arundel is a designer and media artist whose work primarily focuses on the interplay of data in visual and sonic forms. His art delves into social issues related to technology, climate, and politics.
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