2023 / video, otter.ai, artist’s voice
During an artist residency at The Frank-Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry (Spring 2023), The Degradation of Speech was an exploration in voice capture, vocal fatigue, reputation, and the (mis)recognition and degradation of speech. The resulting work was after several recordings and attempts to read the following poem I wrote as a set of questions that have served as prompts and guides throughout the research and writing process of my ongoing work, Sonic Futures. This text was read to otter.ai and in what I believed to be the same prosody and affect, which is a futile exercise because of the inability to perfectly mimic my speech with every single recitation due to duration, effects of the immediate environment on the body and vocal cords, and the fatigue of repetition.
The Degradation of Speech
the space between words and sentences filled with filler how
do I make the spaces and gaps of my speech bind closer together?
how might I do this without speaking too quickly?
will I be understood?
how do I prevent this speech from degrading over time?
how do I send this to you through machines and bodies?
what if it doesn’t reach you in time?
what then?
what can I do to make sure the umms, likes, and fillers don’t make it in?
will you understand me more if my speech is suggestive or softer or louder?
how do you want me to tell you what is swirling in my bloodstream and in my mind ?
how might I do this all while sacrificing being perfectly understood?
how do I prevent the degradation of speech?
In thinking through this initial phase of exploring various voice recognition techniques and softwares, this work was also deeply informed by composer and sound artist William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops (2001) and I Am Sitting in a Room (1969) by composer Alvin Lucier.
Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. 