Scream (2018)
Scream (2018) is an audiovisual installation that uses face-tracking as an input to control an instrument built from the audio portion of The Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS) by Livingstone & Russo (licensed under CC BY-NA-SC 4.0). Facial features and gestures are used to construct textures from the database using Corpus-Based Concatenative Synthesis. This work is part of an ongoing series exploring artistic applications of audio datasets, bodily interfaces to recorded sound, and new visual and physical interfaces to the exploration of sound corpuses.
Scream uses perhaps the most primal sound-making device, the mouth, in a silent, visual capacity. It creates a one-to-many mapping in terms of people, allowing the gestures of one person to be expressed through the voices of many. The installation’s title doubles as an instruction, encouraging participants to scream, for whatever reason they may want to, through the voices of others without needing to make any sound acoustically.