-> 1960s Rotary Dial Telephone, Arduino & electronics, Bespoke software
-> 7” x 9.8” x 4.5”
Picking up the receiver, the audience dials an arbitrary 8-digit number, triggering the phone to guide them into a state of chaos, noise, and feedback. Each new number disrupts the signal, shifting the soundscape to a distinct state tied to the dialed number.
This piece was presented with an Ambisonic 29-channel system in May, 2023, at the Spatial Audio Studio at Rhode Island School of Design.
Cybernetics suggests that the world functions as a complex network governed by the exchange of information and feedback among its nodes. The telephone, a primitive yet remarkable device, was the first to transform the world into an interconnected system where information flows rapidly and on a great scale. But this telephone is not about control–it’s about losing it. By quantifying information content, Cybernetics acknowledges entropy—the measure of disorder or randomness within a system—as integral to the flow of information both within and between systems. No matter the number dialed, noise—the most primitive form of sound—flows in as turbulence, encompassing as synthesized tones, utterances, and melodies.
-> Listen to the reocrded soundtrack
The speech used in the piece was generated from an AI-cloned voice of Jane Barbe, the Time Lady whose voice was heard by millions of households over the past century. The model captures not only her voice but also the subtle textures of her recordings: noise, filters, and phone line qualities. In this piece, Barbe’s voice delivers broken, disjointed sentences on topics like consciousness and freedom, her words fragmented: the succeeding sentence seems related to the preceding one, though sometimes it does not. Are the relationships only in our heads? Is that so?
Noise is the product of a system with a great number of uncertain, possible states. Machine learning model training starts from a noisy initial state, where meaningful patterns or structures are captured and compressed, with high-dimensional data represented in lower dimensions—in other words, a latent space. Any random fluctuations in the system can lead to a possible destination. From the noise, we see an infinite number of parallel futures.
internal structure of a rotary dial telephone
with a custom-programmed arduino board
-> Special thanks to Griffin Smith, Shawn Greenlee, and Stephen Cooke for their generous help and feedback.