This multi-channel radio installation includes scrambled transmissions of people who speak like machines for audiences of people, as well as people who speak like people for audiences of machines. Cold War era techniques of counter-intelligibility meet cybernetic training models. An interference signal occasionally broadcasts from the hollow space between these two logics, escaping into the air.

One transmission, broadcasting in an empty part of the FM band (95.3), merges two sources: collected recordings of numbers stations and numbers spoken as part of training data for machine listening. The numbers spoken in this source are scrambled (chopped up and put back together in a way measured to be as distant from the original as possible). Of these scrambled numbers, only those that are still (mis?)recognized as numbers are allowed through.

A secondary transmission targeting the same frequency as the first (but often missing) bursts in occasionally, interfering through a different set of voices and a different set of numbers. Its sources have not yet been identified, but they speak with urgency and presence.

materials

software

• fm_transmitter
• fm_transmitter
• liquid soap
• pydub

vocal datasets and sources (incomplete)

• common voice datasets
• conet project
• Margaret Morse, "What Do Wealthy Cyborgs Eat?" lecture presented at "The Mediacy of New Media", Dartmouth University, Hanover, New Hampshire, October 27, 2006.
• Anna Friz & Emmanual Madan, The Joy Channel, September 4, 2018.
• Dorothy R. Santos, "24 Hour Kiss", 2022.