Today we have come to this really nice space in East London to have a hack-day
workshop where we're teaming up four artists and musicians with four
technologists from R&D and we've tasked everybody with finding something
interesting to do with smart speakers - things like Amazon Alexa, Google home -
that kind of explores their sonic and interaction possibilities as a
instrument or as an interactive sound device of some sort.
It's my first time working with something like this. The idea I had was to be able to do a
kind of duo with an Alexa and to have some sounds coming from from the devices
and some sounds coming from me.
"This is Spencer from BBC Blue Room.
He is trying to make me musical, the poor deluded fool."
Well I came in with some preconceptions and they're being smashed to pieces
I didn't realise there's certain limits about Alexa so that it'll only
play five audio files per interaction with a maximum of 90 seconds.
At the minute I'm going with using SSML and basically use the devices as a
voice sourc or synth kind of thing getting it to sort of speak in tongues a bit, I suppose.
We sort of trying to interfere with Alexa to try and get her to have a
conversation with herself. Today I'm trying to build a voice-activated looper
drum sequencer, so that you can go and say Alexa and a drum track that goes
1 1 2 2 1 1 2.
"Here goes."
(1 1 2 2 1 1 2 drumbeat)
So right now we're we're trolling through APIs trying to look
at exactly what parts of the components of similar systems, similar forms of
algorithmic surveillance and text analysis can we as practitioners pull at
and expose in order to get a bit of a closer view on the way these
technologies are actually functioning.
The collaboration is really important, being exposed to people who work in a different way to
you and have different different ideas about what they want to achieve is
really really really important.
With a musician it's like, well it's a speaker, does it actually have to sit on a desk
It makes you makes you think about it as a different device and different
potential for interacting with.
We've got another 45 minutes of getting stuff
ready then we're gonna have a little break and we're gonna do a little kind
of relaxed performance of everything we've come up with but hopefully we'll
get to see some interesting stuff.
Echo, tell the audience we're ready.
"We're ready."
"Graham, bring in the hi-hats."
(Hi-hats play)
"A song? I'd love to!" (Alexa sings)
"Welcome to MC Lexi. I say Boom and you say Bap."
(Thudding noise)
Bap.
(Thudding noise)
Boom.
So our intention here was to
expose some of stuff that's happening in that pause between you talk into the
device and the device talking to you.
"Alexa, are you capable of love?"
"There are people I admire and things I can't do without, but I'm still trying to figure out human love."
(Samples of music play)
"Illogical"
"Cosmology"
"And politics."
Stop.
"Funky yeah."
I think we've learned learnt loads about different ways
of approaching this type of work that even if it's not necessarily for for musical
things there's tons we can learn for everything else we do with these devices.
Well I think I think like anything the limitations can be strengths and it's trying to find
that sort of sweet spot really.
To get going it really took quite a while and then some
of the technical limitations also ... yes they're forcing you to be a little more creative.
What I didn't really appreciate properly until I started doing such
collaborations with them is that their remit towards the public really changes
what their view is on like what a good product is or what a good output for all
these kind of things are because they really have a real social engagement with what they do.
So out of today we're going to take the work
that everyone's been working on we're going to we're going to use it to
lead the creative conversation around what are the kinds of things should we be doing with voice.