Georgia Tech Voice+ Research Lab

Last week, the Voice+ Research Lab had the incredible opportunity to participate in the vibrant Guthman Musical Instrument Competition festivities hosted at the Georgia Tech School of Music. On Saturday, March 9, we set up an interactive booth at the Guthman Music, Arts, and Technology Fair, where we had the pleasure of engaging with a diverse range of participants of all ages. Our primary aim was to broaden perspectives on the concept of voice within musical, sonic, and material realms beyond its traditional association solely with semantic content. At our booth, attendees experienced hands-on activities at our listening and recording stations. The listening station featured recordings of 30 distinct voices reading a phonetic pangram—a sentence designed to encompass all 40 sounds in the English language. Participants listened and engaged with the voices' cadence, texture, or pitch through drawing or percussion instruments. Meanwhile, our recording station invited participants to unleash their creativity by voicing international cartoon characters inspired solely by visual cues from illustrations. Witnessing the enthusiasm and curiosity sparked by our activities was truly inspiring. It facilitated a deeper understanding of the multifaceted nature of voice. We look forward to continuing our mission of exploring and celebrating the richness of voice in all its forms. #voice #research

"During the Voice+ Research Lab's inaugural year, we are asking: "What is the role of the human voice in an age and Institute of Technology?" On Wednesday, we hosted our first speaker for the?Voice+ Speaker Series, Kat Mustatea, NYC-based artist and transmedial playwright, to help us answer this question. Mustatea has researched and problematized the relationship between the human voice and technology, particularly considering its importance in storytelling and performance. She spoke about her groundbreaking entry in the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, BodyMouth,?a bespoke computational sound/movement tool that turns the body into an instrument for speech. The instrument is played by a dancer, wearing sensors on various body parts, who sounds out word frequencies, phoneme-by-phoneme, by performing specific gestures in sequence, as if the body is turned into a mouth. Kat's talk focused on understanding the?geometries involved in speech production—including the tongue, oral cavity, lips, and larynx—and how we can map them effectively in a way that allows the dancer to use sensors to control speech production via the body's gestures. The result is beautiful—a performance that blends speech, song, dance, and space. Kat's works caused students to question atmospheric acousmatic voices, linguistic parameters of languages other than English, the ethics of sounding gestures in the ASL community, and more. We invite you to see BodyMouth live at the Georgia Tech School of Music Guthman Musical Instrument Concert on Saturday, March 9, at 7 p.m. at Ferst Center. Thank you so much for speaking with us, Kat!" #musicperformance #musictechnology #voice #dance #performanceart

Enjoy a free anime and J-Pop music concert with JunkoFujiyama hosted by the Japanese program of Georgia Institute of Technology School of Modern Languages.

Join us for the first Voice+ Speaker Series event for Spring 2024. We have the privilege of hosting Kat Mustatea, a transmedia playwright and artist whose language and performance works enlist absurdity, hybridity, and the computational uncanny to dig deeply into what it means to be human.?

What Secrets Do Our Voices Keep? In Georgia Institute of Technology's new Voice+ Research Lab, interdisciplinary researchers explore the voices' myriad roles in music, marketing, technology, culture, medicine, and more. Unless we're sick and lose it — or are once again shocked by how different it sounds on a recording versus in our heads — most of us don't think about our voices too often. They're such a familiar and integral aspect of our lives that we take them for granted.? However, it's precisely because of this prominent role in our lives that one group of Georgia Tech researchers is studying the voice. At the new Voice+ Research Lab,?Andrea Jonsson?and her colleagues explore our voices not for the secrets that we tell but for the secrets that our voices keep.?? "I branded it 'Voice Plus' to evoke the question of 'Voice plus what? Technology, history, culture?' It can be so many different things," said Jonsson, an associate professor of French at the?School of Modern Languages.?"The lab will be an innovation hub for theories and methodologies around the voice." #research #researchlab #voice #voices #innovation