Vocal Imaginaries
The research project Voice as a Matter of Design: a Framework for Novel Vocal Imaginaries critically explores the affective and sociocultural implications for human-machine configuration in a time where voice has become a matter of design.
Voice is both a matter of expression and of being heard, and connects deeply to feelings of intimacy, identity, sociality, and performativity. Voices are complex, variable, and diverse; the minute nuances of tone of voice influence the affective tonality and interpretation of what and how we are trying to communicate in a sociocultural context.
Current primarily Western synthetic voice designs often present us with ‘natural’ and heteronormative vocal stereotypes, that do not take vocal diversity into account. To facilitate a broader spectrum of vocal expressions, we explore vocal imaginaries that operate beyond normative vocal stereotypes and develop a framework for pluralistic synthetic voice design.
Explore the research project here.
DATE
2022–2025.
PROJECT MEMBERS
Jonas Fritsch.
Stina Marie Hasse Jørgensen.
Ada Ada Ada.
Søren Lyngsø Knudsen.
Kara Oehler.
Claire Glanois.
COLLABORATION
The research project is supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.
REFERENCES/LINKS
Knudsen, S. L., Fritsch, J., Jørgensen, S. H. and Ada, A. A. (2024) (accepted, forthcoming). The Climate Change Smart Speakers: Probing Novel Vocal Imaginaries. In Proceedings of NordiCHI’24, Uppsala.
Knudsen, S. L., Fritsch, J., and Jørgensen, S. M. H. (2024). MoSS: Unfolding Playful Imaginaries of Synthetic Voice Design through a Modular Smart Speaker. In Companion Publication of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 342–346. [LINK]
Ada, A. A., Jørgensen, S. H., and Fritsch, J. (2024). Cultures of the AI paralinguistic in voice cloning tools. In Companion Publication of The 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 249–252. [LINK]
OVERVIEW OF ALL PUBLICATIONS: [LINK]
