The phone rings. She answers. It's one of those calls – a synthetic voice jabbering away. But this time it’s different. This time the voice seems to know things about her that it shouldn’t. Then there are more voices, and more voices and she finds herself in the midst of a crowd of synthetic characters all peppering her with questions and not always agreeing on just what it is they want to know.
One woman perpetually plugged into a digital world that is unraveling as she listens. This is the comically surreal world of ‘Your Call…’ Where the synthetic voices know more than they should and won’t stop talking and singing about it.
Your Call...' grew out of work Kevin did as a part of the CreST (Creative Speech Technology) Network, a research project based at the University of York, UK. The CreST Network was a collaborative effort which brought together practitioners from science and the arts, all of whom work with the voice. Poets met with programmers, composers met with speech technology engineers, writers met with speech therapists and they began exploring the intersections of art and science and the process of building a common language for working with voice technology.
This two year project culminated in 'Articulate,' the first ever concert of music for live and synthetic voices, presented at the Woodend Gallery, Scarborough U.K. in January of 2013. It was at this concert that the first bits of 'Your Call...' were performed.
