Herbelin B., Jensen K. and Graugaard L. (2008). Visualizing structures of speech expressiveness. In Proc. Computers in Music Modeling and Retrieval CMMR 2008, Copenhagen, DK, May 19-23 2008, pp. 197-207.

Abstract.

Speech is both beautiful and informative. In this work, a conceptual study going through the myth of the tower of Babel and hypothesis on the apparition of articulated language is undertaken in order to create an artistic work investigating the nature of speech. Our interpretation is that a system able to recognize archetypal phonemes through vowels and consonants could be used with several languages to extract the expressive part of speech independently from the meaning of words. A conversion of speech energy into visual particles that form complex visual structures provides us with a mean to represent this expressiveness of speech into a visual mode. This system is presented in an artwork whose scenario is inspired from various artistic and poetic works. The performance is presented at the Re:New festival in May 2008.