Spoken Words
Personal project
Sangwoo Han : Concept, design, Unity programming
Give the noise of the virtual world an extended listen.
What is Spoken Words?
Spoken Words is a generative sound experience. Once you launch the app, it generates sounds on the fly based on the recent Tweets near your current location and plays them. As this progress repeats over time you as an audience will have a never-repeating, infinite sonic experience unique to the moment and the place. The generation algorithm is designed to create a similar sensory experience of being surrounded by ambient city noises. Similar to the city noises, what you will be hearing would be indistinguishable chatters and randomly generated sounds that stand somewhere between music and noise. If the Twitter world of where you are right now is loud and full of positive messages, you will be able to hear that vibrant energy. Meanwhile, you may have a rather calmer experience when Twitter is quiet.
Through Spoken Words, you are tapping into the opposite side of the digital world – physical, chaotic, unclear, and messy.
The generated sound is never the same therefore you have to listen carefully; words once spoken cannot be recalled. This experience is designed to be heard and sensed, rather than read and understood.
Designed and programmed by Sangwoo Han
Spoken words work in languages supported by Google syntax analysis: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Spanish
About the project
Imagine yourself in a small apartment in Manhattan. It is 10:00 pm. You hear anonymous voices yelling outside of windows. You don't know whose voices they are or what they are talking about. Sometimes these sounds join together and are indistinguishable from one another. Meanings and contexts are stripped away, you are left in a temporal space where the self gets disappeared while connections to anonymous others remain. This very moment is rather sensory than cognitive. To me, this passive moment is when I feel the most connected; I don’t have a choice but to take in the noise made by people, events, and unidentifiable human-related activities.
Meanwhile, communication on Social media platforms is instant and ephemeral, yet permanent. Often presented as an infinite vertical feed, AI algorithms relentlessly use your and your friends’ virtual messages with a clear intention to build a silo, solely to entertain your interests so that you end up spending more time – which gets traded with the platform's economic profit – in there. The platforms are even specifically designed for you to create and consume as many messages as possible effortlessly. In this world of confirmation bias, the self gets inflated with over-cognisant but is more disconnected from others than ever.
Spoken Words attempts to shake and destroy this fortress of solitude. I aim to restore the connection to others by intentionally stripping away the meanings and purposes of messages on the digital platforms driven by capitalistic AI. I designed the sound generation algorithm to dismantle the silo of impeccably instrumentalized communications by focusing on individual words, sentiment, quantity, and physical distances of Tweet messages out of their context instead. The digital messages are now not curated nor prioritized but can only be heard and sensed as an incomprehensible noise, to recreate the experience of being surrounded by ambient city noise where only connections to others are left. I suggest the audience sit back and listen to unexpected, sometimes disturbing sounds of digital chatter and rethink our relationships with others driven by capitalism and technological utopianism through this piece.