Speakers

The ‘speakers’ are small sound sculptures that imitate the human vocal tract and produce sounds that lie in the intermediary area of sound and speech, human and machine. I am particularly interested in integrating the objects into architecture, linking architectural resonance spaces with the resonance spaces of the human body/vocal tract. I developed my first speakers during a residency in Bergen/Norway in October/November 2023 and exhibited them as ‘wall speakers’ at Knipsu Gallery. The work was installed in a wall as if it were the ends of pipes, parts of the building’s infrastructure.

The initial impulse for the work was a speech therapy treatment that I started in order to learn the sound of the im german used rolling “r”, which I do not master due to a speech defect. Fascinated by the whole topic of phonetics and speech defects, I decided to build a machine that is able to produce this sound in order to juxtapose the mechanical as well as my physical “glitches” and to work with them artistically. This resulted in the first sound objects that attempt to produce faulty, non-normative, but still somehow human sounds.

By air being blown in, the artificial vocal folds begin to oscillate and a standing tone is produced. The basic tone is modulated and filtered by the overlying vocal tract, which can produce vowels, nasal sounds, but also fricative phonemes (sibilants) such as “ssss” or “ffff”, depending on the shape.