Guest Artist Demo/Talk and Performance: RM Francis

Two Bots and a Ouija Board: Machine Listening for Audio Synthesis

The Media Arts Commons (MAC) | Thursday 9th October | 2pm | Free

I will demonstrate step-by-step the machine listening processes by means of which vocal lines are generated from musical seed files, as well as other tools used to produce the non-vocal accompaniment, such as RAVE (Realtime Audio Variational autoEncoder) and FluCoMa (Fluid Corpus Manipulation). I will also provide some historical context, situating these techniques within multiple lineages, including the history of technologically mediated encounters with the uncanny (19th-century spirit photography, electronic voice phenomena, etc.) and the history of audio synthesis, focusing in particular on voice synthesis, deep learning, and emergent 21st-century synthesis paradigms.

RM FRANCIS:

RM Francis is an artist working with computer-generated sound and language via recording,  performance, and installation. He has presented work at venues throughout North America and Europe, including the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music (Oakland), Gray Area (San Francisco), Parken (Vienna), and Kolonia Artystów (Gdańsk). In recent years, his work has been centered around an exploration of the unique perceptual effects of the simulated human voice and the unstable auditory personae that emerge within the gap between artificial and embodied speech systems. Alongside this inquiry into the material properties of the voice, he is engaged in an investigation of the semantic affordances of spoken language decoupled from its capacity for the communication of human intention. These processes yield a synthetic sprechstimme that traverses a continuum of vocality ranging from abstract sound to uncanny characterological specificity.

His oeuvre includes multimedia works incorporating sound, video, performance, and chocolate (Hyperplastic Other, Nada, 2017), interrogations of historical computer synthesis methods (A Taxonomy of Guffaws, ETAT, 2020), procedural text works for a chorus of synthetic voices (Every Single Person Has Some Muscle, Flea, 2022), and hallucinatory duets between speech-to-text apps and deep learning networks (pedimos un mensaje, Superpang, 2023, and H E L L O After-Person, ETAT, 2025). In addition to his solo projects, he has collaborated with Jack Callahan & Jeff Witscher, Jung An Tagen, and farmersmanual, among others. He lives in Seattle.

Photo credit: Isak Han

DIRECTIONS:

Our brand new Media Arts Commons (MAC) is located in the new Mill Ave Student Housing (MASH) dorms on Myrtle Ave. From the courtyard, head toward the north. The MAC is between the printmaking studio and the dance studio.