Sound Art

Audio PlaceboPlaza

Audio Placebo Plaza

22.06.2021 , Digital Media, Embodied Media/Performance/Scores, Gallery Artwork, Music Composition, Portfolio, Sound Art

Poster for Audio Placebo Plaza: Montreal Edition (2021)

2021 / 2022

In June 2021 the trio transformed a former perfume shop in the St Hubert Plaza of Montreal into a pop up radio station, sensory room, therapist office, and audio production studio, uniting these spaces through the aesthetics of a sandwich shop or cafe to offer customizable audio placebo “specials” and “combos” to the public.

Founded upon principles of feminism, socialism, and audio production excellence, Audio Placebo Plaza invites everyday people to take appointments with artists to discuss how an audio placebo could help improve their lives. These appointments are entirely focused on the individual and are in themselves part of the process. Common topics of discussion included increasing productivity, self-esteem, self-care, social interactivity, brain hacking, mitigating insomnia, and pain management, but also one’s aural preferences, sensitivities, and curiosities. Intake sessions were conducted in a blended telematic/in-person structure to determine one’s familiarity and comfort levels with a variety of psychosomatic audio techniques including but not limited to soundscapes, binaural beats, simulated social interactions, positive affirmations, drone, participatory vocalization, ASMR, guided meditation and deep listening.

After the consultation is complete, team members met to discuss each participant’s case to fulfill their “prescription,” and also to divide the labor amongst the three creators. The collaborations are non-hierarchical, adaptive, and simultaneous: one might be working on up to four projects at a time, or trade tasks depending on one’s backlog of labor. Labor is divided into recording sounds, conducting intake sessions, writing scripts, performing spoken or sung content, writing music, editing and audio mixing, cleaning and maintaining the shared spares, and communicating with visitors or walk-ins.

Audio Placebo Plaza Radio broadcast was facilitated through a pirate radio transmitter as well as an internet radio station. We broadcast completed placebos, shared technical advice and performance practices during informal critiques, work sessions in progress through the DAW, and sometimes informal chats with visitors. Intake sessions were also broadcasted (with the consent of visitors).

Through Audio Placebo Place, we explore and develop methods for sound and music that propose emotional labor, listening, collaboration and “music as repair” (see Suzanne Cusick, 2008) as key elements that shape the sonic-social encounter between artists and the public.

Can placebos help?
Does sound have the power to process complex emotions?
Can music give you what you need?
Is this even music?

The Montreal edition of Audio Placebo Plaza has been archived by Andy Stuhl at Wave Farm (NY, USA)
https://wavefarm.org/radio/archive/works/kdtgwn

We created a commemorative booklet for Audio Placebo Plaza: Montreal edition with writing by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
https://audioplaceboplaza.com/Publication

Credits

Audio Placebo Plaza is a community sound art project conceived by Julia E Dyck, Erin Gee and Vivian Li .

Graphic design by Sultana Bambino.

Gallery

Audio Placebo Plaza Montreal Poster

In November 2022 Audio Placebo Plaza traveled to Karachi Pakistan as part of the Karachi Biennale.

Audio Placebo Plaza (APP) is a female and non-gender conforming collective of artists (Julia E. Dyck, Erin Gee, Vivian Li) focused on the expansion of intersectional feminist methods of care, emotional labor, collaboration, and community in sound art. APP considers “placebo” as a complex, open-ended, and optimistic conceptual framework for work that embraces irony, play, and co-performativity in psychosomatic sound art. Through performance and interactivity, APP engages with community members to discuss these topics, creating original audio artworks based on conversations in our healing space. We offer everyday people customized positive messages, audio creations, healing frequencies, binaural beats, and ASMR, responding to the needs of our community through a practice of radical sonic care. We promise our fullest intention.
https://audioplaceboplaza.com/

You can listen to the albums from the Montreal edition and the Karachi edition here:
https://audioplaceboplaza.bandcamp.com/

Audio Placebo Plaza – Pillow Talk Radio
https://www.instagram.com/p/CucUFrboaoU/?img_index=1

 

Press

https://www.thenews.com.pk/magazine/you/1014017-visionary-women

https://mmnews.tv/here-are-artworks-you-must-visit-at-karachi-biennale-2022/

https://www.dawn.com/news/1717389/3rd-karachi-biennale-promises-interesting-display-of-artistic-talent

https://www.thenews.com.pk/magazine/us/1008137-karachi-biennale-2022-where-art-meets-technology

https://www.arabnews.pk/node/2191651/lifestyle

https://thekarachicollective.com/on-coevolution-and-the-spaces-we-build-for-ourselves-dialog-on-kb22/?fbclid=IwAR2IVRyA719mOdAwV4wHo2RIma45pJugdHywE9JAvD7wAc6hffvRx03g1ww

Credits

Audio Placebo Plaza is a community sound art project conceived by Julia E Dyck, Erin Gee and Vivian Li .

Graphic design by Sultana Bambino.

Gallery

Audio Placebo Plaza Karachi

Machine Unlearning

31.01.2020 , Digital Media, Embodied Media/Performance/Scores, Gallery Artwork, Performance, Portfolio, Robotics/AI/XR/Quantum, Sound Art

Vision calibration from Machine Unlearning (2020).
Photography by Elody Libe. Image courtesy of the artist.

2020

In Machine Unlearning, the artist greets the viewer and slowly offers them a unique neural conditioning “treatment”: sonically reproducing the unraveling outputs of an LSTM algorithm as it “unlearns” through whispering, moving backwards in time through its epochs of training.

This aural treatment is couched in a first-person roleplay scenario that grounds the viewer through a series of simple audio visual tests. At no point is the neural network technology “seen” – it is instead performed by a human interlocuter, translated into affective vocality and whispered text. The algorithm was created by media artist Sofian Audry, and trained on the text of Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights (1847). This novel was chosen in part because of its richly poetic syntax, but also for its feminine vocality and conceptual themes of love and intergenerational trauma. Machine Unlearning is a novel combination of neural network technologies and the popular internet genre “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response,” or ASMR. ASMR is a social media genre that has developed largely through massive social media metrics in the form of upvotes, clicks, comments, subscribes, and likes in response to audio visual stimuli that creates feelings of mild euphoria, relaxation and pleasure. ASMR fans online seek out specific video content that causes the physiological reaction of “tingles” – tingling sensations across the skin, a mild body high, or simply a means of falling asleep. Gee considers ASMR as a form of psychosomatic body hacking. By combining machine learning with ASMR, Gee draws parallels between cutting edge autonomous/non-conscious algorithms and the autonomous/unconscious functions of the human body. Just as ASMRtists use specific sounds and visual patterns in their videos to “trigger” physical reactions in the viewer, machine learning algorithms also unconsciously respond to patterns perceived through limited senses in order to develop learning (and unlearning) results. The artist’s emphasis on whispering the textual outputs of the algorithm as it slowly “unlearns” allows the listener to grasp the materiality of machine learning processes at a human level, but also a subconscious level: allowing one’s body to be mildly and charmingly “hacked” through soft and gentle play.

The use of the word “intelligence” in the metaphor of AI focuses on higher functions of consciousness that algorithms do not possess. While algorithms have not meaningfully achieved a humanistic consciousness to date, today’s algorithms act autonomously on sensory information, processing data from its environment in unconscious, automatic ways. The human brain also responds unconsciously and automatically to sensory data in its environment, for example, even if you are not conscious of how hot a stove is, if you place your hand on a hot stove, your hand will automatically pull away. These unconscious, physiological actions in the sensory realm points to an area of common experience between algorithms and the human.  For more explanation of these ideas, take a look at the work of postmodern literary critic N. Katherine Hayles in her 2017 book Unthought: The power of the cognitive nonconscious.  In this way I wonder if the expression “autonomous intelligence” makes more sense than “artificial intelligence”, however like posthumanist feminist Rosi Braidotti I am deeply suspicious of the humanist pride that our species takes in the word “intelligence” as something that confers a special status and justification for domination of other forms of life on earth.

Credits

Photography and videography by Elody Libe.

Production Support: Machine Unlearning video installation was produced at Perte de Signal with the support of the MacKenzie Art Gallery for the exhibition To the Sooe (2020) curated by Tak Pham.

The roleplay performance was developed during my artistic residency at Locus Sonus – École Superieur d’art d’Aix en Provence and Laboratoire PRISM.

Custom LSTM Algorithm created by media artist Sofian Audry

Video

Machine Unlearning (2020)
Videography by Elody Libe

Gallery

This work was first developed as a performance that debuted at Cluster Festival, Winnipeg in 2019.  During live performance, each audience member dons a pair of wireless headphones.  The performance allows the audience members to see the ASMR “result” of the performance for camera, simultaneous with the ability to see my “backstage” manipulation of props and light in real time.

to the sooe

11.10.2018 , Gallery Artwork, Physical Media, Portfolio, Robotics/AI/XR/Quantum, Sound Art

to the sooe (2018)
Sofian Audry and Erin Gee. Photography: Alexandre Saunier

2018

A 3D printed sound object that houses a human voice murmuring the words of a neural network trained by a deceased author.

to the sooe (SLS 3D printed object, electronics, laser-etched acrylic, audio, 2018) is the second piece in a body of work Erin Gee made in collaboration with artist Sofian Audry that explores the material and authorial agencies of a deceased author, a LSTM algorithm, and an ASMR performer.

The work in this series transmits the aesthetics of an AI “voice” that speaks through outputted text through the sounds of Gee’s softly spoken human vocals, using a human body as a relatively low-tech filter for processes of machine automation.  Other works in this series include of the soone (2018), and Machine Unlearning (2018-2019)

to the sooe is a sound object that features a binaural recording of Erin Gee’s voice as she re-articulates the murmurs of a machine learning algorithm learning to speak. Through this work, the artists re-embody the cognitive processes and creative voices of three agents (a deceased author, a deep learning neural net, and an ASMR performer) into a tangible device. These human and nonhuman agencies are materialized in the object through speaking and writing: a disembodied human voice, words etched onto a mirrored, acrylic surface, as well as code written into the device’s silicon memory.

The algorithmic process used in this work is a deep recurrent neural network agent known as “long short term memory” (LSTM). The algorithm “reads” Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights character by character, familiarizing itself with the syntactical universe of the text. As it reads and re-reads the book, it attempts to mimic Brontë’s style within the constraints of its own artificial “body”, hence finding its own alien voice.

The reading of this AI-generated text by a human speaker allows the listener to experience simultaneously the neural network agent’s linguistic journey as well as the augmentation of this speech through vocalization techniques adapted from Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR). ASMR involves the use of acoustic “triggers” such as gentle whispering, fingers scratching or tapping, in an attempt to induce tingling sensations and pleasurable auditory-tactile synaesthesia in the user. Through these autonomous physiological experiences, the artists hope to reveal the autonomous nature of the listener’s own body, implying the listener as an already-cyborgian aspect of the hybrid system in place.

Credits

Sofian Audry – neural network programming and training

Erin Gee – vocal performer, audio recording and editing, electronics

Grégory Perrin – 3D printing design and laser etching

Exhibition history

Taking Care – Hexagram Campus Exhibition @ Ars Electronica, Linz Sept 5-11 2018. Curated by Ana Kerekes.

Printemps Numérique – McCord Museum Montreal, May 29-June 3 2019. Curated by Erandy Vergara.

To the Sooe – MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina January 26-April 26, 2020. Curated by Tak Pham.

Sounds

to the sooe (2018)

Gallery

of the soone

25.04.2017 , Digital Media, Gallery Artwork, Portfolio, Robotics/AI/XR/Quantum, Sound Art

of the soone (2018) Print

2018

A disembodied voice invites the listener to partake in a speculative audio treatment that promises to awaken underdeveloped neural passageways through exposure to the non-human processes of neural network language acquisition.

In this work, media artists Erin Gee and Sofian Audry expose listeners to the architectures of an artificial intelligence algorithm through the sounds of an Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) roleplay. ASMR is a genre of audio and videomaking developed by internet aficionados interested in using specific everyday sounds (whispering, soft voice, crinkling and textured sounds) alongside verbal suggestion to “trigger” pleasant tingling reactions in the body of the listener. The artists combined these ASMR principles of sound with artificial intelligence to create a speculative neural conditioning treatment. In of the soone, the listener encounters a soft female voice that whispers a script written by a machine learning algorithm as it slowly loses its neural training and “forgets.” This combination of algorithmic text and ASMR connects the unconscious, automatic processes of artificial intelligence algorithms to the autonomous reactions of the human body to sound, using intimacy to “hack” into the subconscious of the human listener and recondition neural pathways.

Credits

Sofian Audry

Erin Gee

Exhibition history

October 2020: Digital Cultures: Imagined Futures Audio Programme curated by Joseph Cutts. Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Warszawa Poland

June 9 to August 19, 2018: Pendoran Vinci. Art and Artificial Intelligence Today  curated by Peggy Schoenegge and Tina Sauerländer. NRW Forum, Düsseldorf, Germany

January 2018: Her Environment @ TCC Gallery, Chicago

Sounds

of the soone (2018)

Gallery

of the soone – print. text 2018. Courtesy of artists.

Erin Gee - Vocaloid Gig At Nocturne (X + 1)

Gig Vocaloid

28.01.2016 , Embodied Media/Performance/Scores, Gallery Artwork, Performance, Portfolio, Sound Art

Gig Vocaloid (2015)
Vocaloid Gig At Nocturne (X + 1)

2015

A video-text pop band from a dystopic future where the human voice is lost and pop music reigns supreme.

Virtual voices are key for these pop stars. Dancing, costumed performers carry tablets that display the human larynx and song lyrics as they dance in sync.

The project is inspired by virtual pop stars such as Hatsune Miku, which exist equally as distributed visual media avatar (holograms, merchandise), and as digital software tools for public, fan-based synthesized vocal creation. GIG VOCALOID is also inspired by boy and girl pop bands, whereupon individual voices and musicality are often superseded by a pop “character.” This is especially true in Japanese pop group AKB48, which has 48 female members whom are voted upon by the public for the right to solo singing and “leadership” within the group.

In this pop music context, celebrity character, fashion and visual appeal is more important than the human singing voice itself, which is often replaced by synthesizers and pitch correction. GIG VOCALOID invokes a fantasy posthumanist future where the human voice is lost, subjectivity is dead, and everyone is celebrating.

Externalizing the human voice outside of the preciousness of the human body, the human larynx (typically a hidden, interior aspect of vocal performance) is displayed prominently on tablets. “Lyrics” to their song flash aleatorically through these videos, which enable humans performers to be the support for digital artwork. GIG VOCALOID re-localizates the voice beyond the borders of the flesh body in an infectious avatar-dream.

Performance history

GIG VOCALOID is a virtual pop band that had its first performance at the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montreal in February 2015 at X + 1: an evening of Internet-inspired art.

Gallery

Gig Vocaloid (2015)
Vocaloid Gig At Nocturne (X + 1)

Erin Gee - 7 Nights of Unspeakable Truth at Nuit Blanche Toronto 2013

7 Nights of Unspeakable Truth

28.01.2016 , Digital Media, Gallery Artwork, Performance, Physical Media, Portfolio, Sculpture, Sound Art

7 Nights of Unspeakable Truth at Nuit Blanche Toronto (2013)
7-channel audio installation, woven blankets, text work
8 hours duration

2013

It’s a search for disembodied voices in technotongues.

“7 Nights of Unspeakable Truth is a recording that consists of dusk-till dawn searches for number stations on shortwave radio frequencies. Arranged in order, from day one to day seven, the installation allows one to physically walk through seven evenings of shortwave, synchronized in their respective times, in physical space. This spatialization of each night allows listeners to observe patterns and synchronicities in Gee’s nightly search for unexplained broadcasts that consist only of numbers, tones and codes.”

This body of work is informed by my fascination with mystery, symbolic organization and communication. I take on the nocturnal patterns of a solitary listener, connecting to other enthusiasts via online chat in order to share an obscure passion. The patterns of my searching during 7 Nights of Unspeakable Truth are woven directly into blankets, another evening activity partaken during Nuit Blanche 2013 in which I encoded and wove my audio searches into a physical form that you could wrap yourself in while you listen – two different versions of encoded time on radio airwaves.

More on this work:

Gautier, Philippe-Aubert. “Multichannel sound and spatial sound creation at Sporobole: A short account of live performance, studio design, outdoor multichannel audio, and visiting artists.” Divergence Press #3: Creative Practice in Electroacoustic Music (2016).

Exhibition/Performance history

Nuit Blanche Toronto (2013)

Links

Additional Research by Erin Gee
Academic article by Philippe-Aubert Gautier

Video

7 Nights of Unspeakable Truth (2013)

Gallery

7 Nights of Unspeakable Truth (2013)

Orpheux Larnyx

23.01.2016 , Music Composition, Performance, Portfolio, Robotics, Sound Art

Orpheux Larnyx (2011)

2011

Vocal work for three artificial voices and soprano, feat. Stelarc.
Music by Erin Gee, text by Margaret Atwood.

I made Orpheux Larynx while in residence at the MARCs Auditory Laboratories at the University of Western Sydney, Australia in the summer of 2011. I was invited by Stelarc to create a performance work with an intriguing device he was developing there called the Prosthetic Head, a computerized conversational agent that responds to keyboard-based chat-input with an 8-bit baritone voice. I worked from the idea of creating a choir of Stelarcs, and developed music for three voices by digitally manipulating the avatar’s voice. Eventually Stelarc’s avatar voices were given the bodies of three robots: a mechanical arm, a modified segueway, and a commercially available device called a PPLbot. I sang along with this avatar-choir, while carrying my own silent avatar with me on a djgital screen.

It is said that after Orpheus’ head was ripped from his body, he continued singing as his head floated down a river. He was rescued by two nymphs, who lifted his head to the heavens, to become a star. In this performance, all the characters (Stelarc’s, my voice, Orpheus, Euridice, the nymphs) are blended into intersubjective robotic shells that speak and sing on our behalf. The flexibility of the avatar facilitates a pluratity of voices to emerge from relatively few physical bodies, blending past subjects into present but also possible future subjects. Orpheus is tripled to become a multi-headed Orpheux, simultaneously disembodied head, humanoid nymph, deceased Euridice. The meaning of the work is in the dissonant proximity between the past and present characters, as well as my own identity inhabiting the bodies and voices of Stelarc’s prosthetic self.

Credits

Music, video and performance by Erin Gee. Lyrics “Orpheus (1)” and “Orpheus (2)” by Margaret Atwood. Robotics by Damith Herath. Technical Support by Zhenzhi Zhang (MARCs Robotics Lab, University of Western Sydney). Choreography coaching by Staci Parlato-Harris.

Special thanks to Stelarc and Garth Paine for their support in the creation of the project.

This research project is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and MARCS Auditory Labs at the University of Western Sydney. The Thinking Head project is funded by the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Music: Orpheux Larynx © 2011 . Lyrics are the poems by Margaret Atwood: “Orpheus (1)” and “Orpheus (2)”, from the poetry collection Selected Poems, 1966 – 1984 currently published by Oxford University Press © 1990 by Margaret Atwood. In the United States, the poems appear in Selected Poems II, 1976 – 1986currently published by Houghton Mifflin © 1987 by Margaret Atwood. In the UK, these poems appear in Eating Fire, Selected Poetry 1965 – 1995 currently published by Virago Press, ©1998 by Margaret Atwood. All rights reserved.

Video

Orpheux Larnyx (2011)

Gallery

Orpheux Larnyx (2011)

Voice of Echo

16.01.2016 , Digital Media, Gallery Artwork, Music Composition, Physical Media, Portfolio, Sound Art

Voice of Echo Series (2011)
Works for video, audio, and archival inkjet prints.

2011

Propelling the mythology of Narcissus and Echo into a science-fiction future, I translate Echo’s golem-like body into a digital environment.

I became Echo in a silent performance for camera: a love song for an absent Narcissus (who is necessary to give Echo presence at all!). I later interpret the digital data from these images not in imaging software, but instead in audio software, revealing a noisy landscape of glitch, expressivity and vocality.  I bounced the data back and forth between the audio and image softwares, “composing” the visual and audio work through delays, copy/paste of image. While the natural world and human perspective created a cruel hierarchy between a human subject/image and a golem-like nymph who was invisible except as voice, technology and machine perspective allow the image and the sound to coexist and presuppose one another. The work is a futurist, emancipatory tale of non-human wrenching itself from dependency on human and instead revealing itself as an entangled, co-constitutive force.

What is the Voice of Echo?  It exists as repetition – of human voice, of Narcissus, a voice that extends anothers’ voice, this other body is somehow more tangible than Echo’s own body. The voice of echo and other non-human voices are unconscious and environmental, ambient, existing beyond symbolic content, the repetitions. The voice of Echo exists as a bouncing of processes, a distortion, a glitch, born of a love and desire uttered but never really heard.

I took stills from this love song and translated the raw visual data into an audio editing program, choosing particular interpretation methods to “compose” the echo.  I bounced this data between photoshop and audacity multiple times, eventually coming at glitched sounds of data interpretation, as well as an accompanying distorted image for each “song”.  Echo may only traditionally exist as a re-utterance of Narcissus’ voice, but in this case her cyberfeminist reimagining points at perverse loops somewhere between love, repetition and becoming.

Exhibition history

Dream Machines. TCC Chicago. Curated by Her Environment, August 16-30 2016.

Voice of Echo (solo exhibition) Gallerywest, Toronto. Curated by Evan Tyler, January 5–27, 2012.

Parer Place Urban Screens. Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane AUS. May 18-20 2012.

Uncanny Sound. TACTIC, Cork, Ireland. Curated by Liam Slevin, September 14-24 2012.

Contemporary Projects. Curated by David Garneau and Sylvia Ziemann, Regina SK, 2011.

Links

Essay by G. Douglas Barrett (2011)
Review - Zouch Magazine Toronto

Sounds

Voice of Echo (2011)

Video

Voice of Echo: Song of Love for Technological Eyes (2011)
silent HD video for monitor playback, 18:01 (looped)  Photography by Kotama Bouabane.

Echo is in love with recording technology, particularly the video camera. The mirrors emanating from her throat are her concrete manifestations of her voice – the lovesong intended for the camera’s eye.

Above is the “original video work” that got the call and response process started.

Gallery

No grid was found for: Voice of Echo.

Voice of Echo (2011)