In the Blink of an Eye
In the Blink of an Eye is a study for a sound installation. The installation consists of a six channel surround sound setup driven by a web-connected system. The system crawls the web searching for current events and injects the information into a real-time open rhythmic score. The score is modeled after Terry Riley's seminal minimalist composition In C.
The open score consists of a bank of 53 precomposed rhythmic patterns. All of the players start with the same rhythmic pattern and move through them in the same sequence, but at different paces. At the start of the piece they speak in unison, but as some players move through the sequence of patterns faster or slower, they slowly drift out of phase with each other, forming various interlocking polyrhythms.
The actual sound is sonified text extracted from the Internet in real-time. As each player switches from pattern to pattern, the player gets a new and unique news headline to be spoken according to the new pattern. In this way, the system is continually changing, evolving and renewing itself.
Though the sonification system is modeled after a musical composition, the rhythmic patterns merely provide a method to call attention to emergent behavior in the system. A shift in rhythm signals a new bit of information added to the system. Call and response patterns begin to develop, which reorganize and juxtapose the data, creating new information. The continual evolution also serves to shift the listener's attention as spaces open up between the voices.
The software consists of four major components:- A web page crawler which explores and analyzes analyzes web pages.
- A text-to-speech program which synthesizes words and phrases into sound files.
- A sound synthesis program which sonifies the words and phrases according to a rhythmic score.
- A controller program which coordinates the disparate parts of the system.
Crawler
The crawler is a custom piece of software which spiders internet news services, analyzes and extracts text, and keeps track of where it's been.
Speech Synthesis
The list of words and phrases produced by the crawler is passed on to the Festival Speech Synthesis System for text-to-speech synthesis. Using a random voice for each phrase, Festival generates a sound file which is stored on disk.
Sound Synthesis
A ChucK script is used to "play" the synthesized speech files into the installation space. The script has a MIDI-like score representing the 53 different rythmic patterns. It requests sound files from the controller program using OSC messages. Each player decides how many times to play its pattern. When the player is done playing a pattern, it requests a new sound file from the controller program and begins playing the next pattern with the new file.