Year: 1999–2003
Easy Listening is an installation that uses speech recognition technology to play with the conventions of the café situation. Microphones continuously monitor conversations at selected tables, feeding the audio to a computer that attempts to transcribe speech into text. The results — based on a vocabulary drawn from a typical American business newspaper, and requiring perfect English — are displayed on monitors around the space.
The machine’s constant misinterpretations create a surreal and humorous sub-text, producing a filter through which the ordinary babble of café life generates new, unintended meanings beyond the limits of the technology. As one critic wrote, the work points to “a production of meaning beyond, or inside, the circumscriptions of technology.”
Frøysland has described the work as an inquiry into what he calls the “hype traps that the computer and media industry wants us to believe in.”
Exhibitions
- Piksel Festival, Landmark, Bergen — November 2003
- Dissonanze Festival, Rome, Italy — October 2003
- Electrohype, Malmö, Sweden — 2002
- Zoolounge, Oslo — April–June 1999
Technical realisation: Carlo Prelz. Uses CMU Sphinx Open Source Speech Recognition.