Description

Together Apart is a web-based, generative sound installation which produces aleatoric text-sound compositions. The text-sound compositions are aleatoric in that they are configured as a randomized, indeterministic improvisation in a controlled setting (that is, the code and system running the website). Together Apart pairs utterances of matching words and phrases streamed live from various radio stations across the internet.

The work continuously monitors multiple radio streams simultaneously using a machine “listening” algorithm to transcribe the audio into text in real time. These live transcriptions appear as a fleeting constellation of words, evoking the dispersion of sound through space. When two unrelated voices are detected uttering the same word or phrase simultaneously, the corresponding excerpts from the live radio broadcasts are extracted, collected, and superimposed into a shared utterance pairing.

Successive pairings are appended to the composition, while some existing pairings may randomly be removed. Temporal coincidence structures a compositional score; its arrangement produces quasi-sentences that drift unpredictably between coherence and nonsense.