POW
2012. Sound works from a concatenative speech synthesiser
Voice model built from Colin Powell's address to the UN Security Council, 5 February 2003
A synthetic voice with Colin Powell's timbre, built from the speech he gave at the United Nations in 2003, able to say anything.
- Research line
- L5
On 5 February 2003 the United States Secretary of State, Colin Powell, addressed the United Nations Security Council to make the case for invading Iraq. The evidence he presented was later shown to be false. I segmented the whole recording of that speech by hand into phonetic units and built a concatenative voice synthesiser from them. Concatenative synthesis recombines fragments of the source audio, so the voice does not imitate Powell: it utters the sounds he made that day, in another order. The material was one speech, badly recorded, and the segmentation was rough. I wanted the roughness to stay audible. With it I made a version of I Have a Dream assembled entirely from Powell's sounds, and a babbling laid over the recording of an American nuclear test.