Seth Scott – Points of Articulation: Episode 1
Wednesday, 16 September⋅2:00 – 2:20pm
(series)
At 2pm today we have the start of a new series by sound designer and composer Seth Scott. ‘Points of Articulation’ is an experimental radio drama exploring the politics and poetics of synthesised speech. You can hear subsequent episodes at the same time – 2 o’clock, throughout the rest of this week.
Friar Bacon is trying to make a statue speak. Alone with his books, machines and a patchy understanding of the human anatomy, he sets out on an arduous quest to synthesise the human voice. As he traverses the deep history of speech science, his experiments grow unstable, feverish and strange…
We live in a cacophony of artificial voices; a chorus of ‘smart’ assistants, customer service avatars, navigation systems, advertising voiceovers and deepfakes which become more difficult by the day to distinguish from the real thing. Whilst the ubiquity of these digital, incorporeal voices is reasonably new, fantasies of artificial bodies are not; they featured in Ancient scientific writing and mythology, in literature and historiography in the Middle Ages, and they began to take shape in Renaissance Europe in the form of sophisticated and imaginative automata. Tales of celebrated scholars combining arcane knowledge, technical innovation and diabolical magic to create clairvoyant talking heads illuminate complex relationships between nature and artifice, mechanics and magic, and between different types of intelligence and knowledge in pre-modern thought. They also resonate in quite an uncanny way with current discourse around technology, the body, creativity and labour in the wake of recent developments in machine learning and generative AI.
‘Points of Articulation’ is based on an Elizabethan stage play about a scholar who makes a pact with the devil to make a brass statue speak, the piece explores a history of speaking machines and our changing attitudes towards them. The series weaves together historical and contemporary narratives, using sound and music to explore the politics and poetics of synthesised speech.
