Mélia Roger (*1996, France) is a sound artist and sound designer for film and installations. Her work explores the sonic poetics of the landscape, through field recordings and active listening performances. Exploring human non-humans relations, she tries to inspire ecological change with environmental and empathic listening (Sound Arts Lecture Series | CRiSAP research centre, UAL, 2023). She works a lot with the voice and very recent technologies 

I found interesting her piece ‘Voice as matter, matter of voice’. She says a sentence to the translator and it translates it to Spanish from her native French. Then she repeats what she hears and translator re-translates. At some point it is becoming a loop and translator is creating new random sentences. Mélia wants to see how the machine reacts with a non-sensical sentences and how the application creates links between two languages. This technique somehow reminds Alvien Lucier’s piece ‘I am sitting in the room’ where he records the sentence over and over again until there is extracted the pure resonance of the space. In the end of Mélia’s exercise with translator there appears a word when the translation stops to change in between languages. Similarly at the end of Lucier’s piece there is only never-ending undistinguishable resonating hum all over and over again.

Another piece of hers ‘The voice is voices’ explores vocal cloning with online tools and IRCAM TTS, program which synthesises speech. The artificial voice has been constructed from many hours of voice recordings and each word is generated completely by the machine, via text-to-text speech synthesis. The installation is playing with listener’s doubt. One speaker is playing Mélia’s real voice and another one is playing the synthesised voice of hers. The idea is creating uncanny feeling based on no possibility to distinguish real and synthesised voice thus question which identity is real and which one is fake. Mélia realised that noises from her mouth produced during the speech are becoming the meeting point of distinguishability between organic and artificial. This piece may be indirectly pointing out to current questions and fears in regards to constantly evolving Artificial Intelligence when interacting with chatbots is slowly becoming indistinguishable from interacting with humans.

Bibliography:

Sound Arts Lecture Series | CRiSAP research centre, UAL (2023). Available at: https://crisap.org/research/projects/sound-arts-lecture-series/.