On Tuesday September 12th I will present ‘his voice’ at dataAche, DRHA2017 at Plymouth University. dataAche is the 21st international conference on Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts (DRHA). Happening over four days, the event will mix keynote papers, workshops, installations and performance.
‘his voice’ presents a live voicing of the results of orchestrated Twitter searches. It is an ongoing project that has a number of iterations and outcomes. A body of text, gathered via online searches for “his voice sounded like”, has been edited to develop two- or three-word phrases, which are then used to search Twitter. In the live event the search results are converted to audio using text-to-speech software. This audio is delivered to me via headphones, and I attempt to speak it. The results include URLs, hashtags and other coded elements that are common in tweets. The flow of information meets the limits of vocal ability and the spoken output may spill into stuttering, gaps and incoherence.
