31.03.2023
00.05 CET
Deutchlandfunk Kultur, German Public Radio (online)
Event Link: https://www.hoerspielundfeature.de/seeking-truth-100.html
Artists: Jonathan Reus with Faye Houston, Jo Bramli and Kassia Zermon
“Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors,” says American virologist Jonas Salk. But how can we arrange our current life in such a way that our descendants will benefit from it?
In order to work on this question, Jonathan Reus established a dialogue between an artificial intelligence and real people. Over a period of one year, each side took the thoughts of the other one further. The results were spoken by an artificial voice, sung and rearranged over and over again. Now “Ahnen in Arbeit – In Search of Good Ancestors” bids farewell to a year long broadcast with a ritual of voices, weaving in and out of, and responding to the shifting voice of the artificial broadcaster.
This ritual, a collaborative performance between the artificial broadcaster, Jonathan, and vocalists Faye Houston, Jo Bramli and Kassia Zermo, will be broadcast on German Public Radio midnight on March 30th to coincide with the silencing of the broadcast radio stream.
The “Ahnen in Arbeit” project is part of the KONTINUUM series of generative sound compositions that appear regularly in the programs of Deutschlandfunk Kultur and ORF Kunstradio.
Credits:
By Jonathan Chaim Reus
With Faye Houston, Johanna Bramli and Kassia Zermon
AI Training Data: Contributions from participants in public workshops by Jonathan Reus and Varia, Linda Johnson (LJSpeech dataset), John Van Stan ( HiFi TTS dataset), voices from the LibriTTS Dataset
Sound Engineering: Dylan Beattie & Jonathan Chaim Reus
Produced By: Deutschlandfunk Kultur/ORF Kunstradio/CTM Festival 2023
Special thanks to: Eleni Ikoniadou (Fugitive Voices), Varia (Joana Chicau, amy pickles, Cristina Cochoir, Angeliki Diakrousi) , Victor Shepardson (Intelligent Instruments Lab, Iceland Academy of Arts), Eren Gölge & Josh Meyer (coqui.ai), Antoine Caillon (ACIDS/IRCAM), Deutschlandfunk Kultur, ORF Ö1 Kunstradio Austria and CTM Festival.
