Thu, 19 May 2005

identification removal services
Initially it was Sarah and Dvhyn and myself, we were going to start this band, all processed audio to be submitted by the internet rabble, only when you ask people straight on for this kind of stuff you get the dullest most godawful stuff, so we built this fake “online erotica community” where people swap mp3s of each other faking orgasms and telling elaborate stories about greatly exaggerated true-life encounters, but even this wasn’t weird enough. We wanted it to look like it had been going on for a while, so that the people who found it wouldn’t feel like they were the first ones in the pool, so we spent a weekend making a slew of audio files using this terminology we had invented in place of regular slang, which is where things like “the secondary anatomy” with erogenous zones hidden between organs which can only be reached through psychic penetration techniques, and this whole method of predicting the future from bumps along the areola, all this shit, and I don’t know if it was peer pressure or we tapped into some sorta pre-existing underground but we got all these audio files where people just picked up this stuff and ran with it. So we let this roll for two months, occasionally goading the subscribers on with some bit of late-night alternate genital ranting, and we ended up with about nine gigs of audio, more than we would probably ever need, so we shut the site down. Some of the subscribers moved on to some wiki out of Austria, but I haven’t checked up on it in a year or so.

At first we thought we’d just plunderphonic our way through it, slice and dice with maybe some bloopy-beep background music, but Dvhyn was on the statistic natural language processing kick again, so we built a grammar which divided every file into a series of words, collected each instance of a similar word (we had to comb this by hand a bit) and FFT an average of all files for each word. This meant that words used often (like “the”) took on a kind of feminine yet homogenized quality which sounded like a breathy and kinda nervous automated operator voice, while words used only once (like “inchoate”) retained entirely the voice of the original lonely kook who whispered it into a desktop microphone, naked in front of the keyboard.

The grammar was also (mostly) a handy-dandy transition matrix, so we fucked around with Markov chaining some text, which (no suprise) didn’t sound very natural, so we fucked around with filters and a bit of granular synthesis goofery until everything sounded like a whisper, which made the lack of continuity between words less of a problem. Then we layered on the reverb and echo and left it running all the time, until we forgot about it. Only we left it running, just barely loud enough to hear, until the thunderstorm hit.

That is where the phrase “Hum Goddess” comes from.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #