It is in “The Cabinet of Curiosities of the Languages of France” that we present, with Gérard Parésys, two sound sculptures: “The landscapes of the larynx” and “The voices of the sandbox”
The Cabinet of Curiosities of the Languages of France presents, in the form of an interactive exhibition, a set of devices that highlights the work of linguistics researchers through an artistic, offbeat perspective, with a playful and educational approach.
More information on the website dedicated to the exhibition.
The voices of the sandbox
Human speech is both one and many. It never stops being created and recreated, shaped by a landscape produced by the relationship between a collective language and individual practices. The creation of this landscape, by stirring the sand, is at the heart of this installation.
The twelve sound excerpts (the voices) used for this work are the result of searching for the word “sand” in the Eslo 1 & 2 database of the Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique. Each excerpt was transcribed into sentences and then segmented into words, syllables and phonemes using the SPPAS software.
Hear and see
At the heart of the installation are the “Sand” and the “Voice”.
The sand height is divided into four geological layers, composed, for the first, of sentences; for the second, of words; for the third, of syllables; and for the last, of phonemes.
The surface of the sand is divided into twelve invisible sections, each corresponding to one of the voices.
You plunge your hand into the sand and you hear and see the sentences, words, syllables or phonemes of the section and layer where your hand is.
By digging into the sand, you pass through the different levels of sentence segmentation all the way to the chant of phonemes, the smallest elements of transcribed language.
By forming a small dune, the sentences appear on the sand and you hear the entire corresponding sound excerpt.
2015 Multimedia sculpture
materials: wood, sand, Kinect, projector, speakers, Processing
We use a respectful, automatic and handcrafted processing of sound and text data (with Praat and Sppas).
Thanks to the AR Sandbox by O. Kreylos.
The landscapes of the larynx
“… I was aware that the act of speaking itself is sculpture … I also consider human thought as the first sculpture, which comes out of man …”. Joseph Beuys
These Landscapes are the fusion of the “relief map” of a given region and the acoustic analysis (pitch and intensity of the voice) of a speaker of that region’s native language. The nine chosen languages are drawn from the corpus of speech of the languages of France: Cèmuhî, Guadeloupean Creole, Réunion Creole, Drehu, French, Kabyle/Berber, Mahoran, Occitan and Picard.
The languages were chosen from this corpus, which is continuously fed by the results of research teams of linguists who relied on the tools and methods used in the field of language sciences. Each recording was transcribed by a researcher and analyzed using sound signal processing software. The speaker’s voice was thus cut into sentences, transcribed and translated.
Is the voice a landscape-sculpture?
Guykayser and G Parésys answer in their own way with a sculpture featuring an interactive device that recreates a new landscape with each visit. These are “The landscapes of the larynx”.
On the dashboard, you choose a language, a color, a size. The voice travels through the landscape and its movement sculpts it. The text ribbon follows the voice. Speech emerges from the shadows and the landscape changes to the rhythm of sounds, words, sentences. Mountain ranges form and dissolve. Following the path of the voice, we wind through a mineral world.
The interactive interface allows us to alternate on the ribbon between the transcription and the translation of the voices, to manipulate the landscape and the text ribbon in 3D, to enlarge, reduce, change color and choose one of the nine “landscapes of the larynx”.
Multimedia sculpture
Materials: wood, dibon, Arduino, speaker, screen, ProcessingWe use a respectful, automatic and handcrafted processing of sound and text data (with Praat and Sppas).
Thanks to the DGLFLF, the LLL and Olivier Baude.
The Cabinet of Curiosities of the Languages of France
The Cabinet of Curiosities of the Languages of France presents, in the form of an interactive exhibition, a set of devices that highlights the work of linguistics researchers through an artistic, offbeat perspective, with a playful and educational approach.
It addresses the question of diversity and the use of languages at a time when French, the official language, is evolving with cultural and social practices, but also in contact with the hundreds of languages spoken in France. It also questions linguistic practices in the digital age, between “social” networks, personal assistants fueled by voice recognition, and automated surveillance systems.
This cabinet of curiosities is the result of collaboration between Labomedia, an Orléans cultural association, a network of structures and artists on a national scale, and the Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique, heir to the first sound portrait of a city and its inhabitants (ESLO: reference “corpus” of spoken French) produced in Orléans in the 1970s and taken up again today to enrich it with new recordings more than forty years later, as so much raw material for historians, sociologists, linguists, computer scientists.
This project thus brings together Labomedia, the Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique UMR 7270 BnF-CNRS-Universités Orléans & Tours and the associations PING in Nantes, Reso-nance numérique in Marseille, Les portes logiques in Quimper, Groupe Laura – Sammy Engramer in Tours, Guykayser and Gérard Paresys, Cécile Babiole.
