Cyclic evolution of a discourse by Voldemars Johansons, Daniil Umanski, Federico Sangati
Background
Verbal communication is probably one of the fundamental channels, which allows people to manifest their relation to the world and one another. It can either be seen as an efficient means to exchange information, express oneself and promote cooperation, or as a phenomenon on its own, taking place with its own evolutionary inertia. People exchange verbal messages between them usually with an idea that their listener is familiar to some extent with the language being used. Furthermore, they usually assume, rather by default, that their listener posses a somewhat similar linguistic representation of the world as does the speaker. In other words, that the mapping between verbal utterances and reality concepts associated with them is roughly coherent (across the individuals involved). This assumption, however necessary, can only hold partially, thanks to an inherent complexity of language, spread over semantic, syntactic and acoustic features. Ambiguities are bound to arise. The original message of the speaker necessarily goes through some transformation on its way to the listeners comprehension of it. Is this mutation between the intended statement and the perceived one an implicit part of verbal communication? Do I really understand what you are saying?
Installation
Within the context of the fundamental questions of language, we stage a play for a number of personal computer actors to perform the “broken telephone” game (also known as “Chinese whispers” or “Silent Post”) in which each successive participant secretly whispers to the next a phrase or sentence whispered to them by the preceding participant.
In an open environment we set up a circular loop of several computer agents equipped with automated speech recognition (ASR) systems and speech synthesis functions. Starting with an initial message - fragments of Roland Barthe's "A Lover's Discourse", an agent speaks (text to speech transformation) out a message while the next one listens (speech to text transformation) and passes the interpretation on to the next agent in circle. The messages are exchanged acoustically in the air and thus are vulnerable both to any noise occurring in the space, and to the (necessarily) imperfect interpretation by the computer listener. As the conversation evolves, a chain reaction of mishearing sets sail. The continuous re-interpretation pattern grows uncontrollably, resulting in some unpredictable cumulative mutation of the original message, amplifying the intrinsic noise of verbal communication.
This experiment in machine conversation sets up a metaphoric stage for misunderstandings inherent to verbal communication augmented by the limitation of available computerized speech systems, questioning both, the phenomenal nature of language itself and the state of development of commonly available speech recognition technology.