Hey everyone,

This post might sound a little strange, but i'm giving it a shot to see if I can find any useful information.

I'm working on my first, continuous sound installation for an art show in mid-May. It involves live sampling of speech (random, short durations between half a second and 5 sec.) interspersed with playback of random files (I have 20-something files now, but the list will grow) to produce an ambient soundscape of speech fragments mixed with randomly chosen audio files.

My ULTIMATE goal is for this piece to maintain interest over a LONG time (the show's length is about 2 hours), and I feel like this will be tough to do. Sampling of voice will not happen continuously, so my patch will have to work with the samples it has acquired. Every time the voice is sampled, someone new is speaking.

I already have code to sample randomly and playback, I'm just curious if anyone had any ideas/tips on precautions I should take before making my MASTER random playback device, or any ideas on how to maintain interest with the sounds. One problem I already see happening is that the more voice samples I add, the less my program will focus on the most recent voice... it would continuously sound more and more dense (hmm... maybe i'll take away old files after a certain limit has reached...).

Any ideas? Or installation patches/performances that I can see for ideas/inspiration?

Any help would be fabulous
Thank you for your time,
Sebastian

Hi Sebastian:
@katjav has written two awesome objects that may help you: [slicerec~] and [sliceplay~] (search for them in the forum). They use a circular buffer of waveforms for realtime playing. [slicerec~] can be set to auto start recording according to sensitivity parameters.
About how to mantain the interest of people for two hours: well, show them sex, guns and blood For some others, may me geeky stuff. You can also promise free food at the end of it.
That paragraph was just in yest. Maybe you should stick to make a good piece of art with its own coherence. Most people have the best intentions and don't behave as you might expect. I think that you should not expect anything, just do your best and it will turn out just fine.
All the best.

Sumidero

Haha, good call on the free food. Thank you so much for your ideas, Sumidero. I'll look into those objects when I have time, but right now i'm putting together a quick version to demo in my class... which starts in about an hour + setup time! Hopefully i'll be happy enough with this to post it up for people to see

Best,
Sebastian