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Media-ted Voices at Sound/Image Festival 2024

Writer's picture: Gaurav SinghGaurav Singh

In November 2024 I was invited to the SOUND/IMAGE Festival at the University of Greenwich. This year’s festival focused on “Mediated Spaces and Immersion”, exploring how our chosen sound and image media fabricate, articulate and question our spaces of experience.

I delivered a talk titled, “The Intimate Dramaturgy of the Machine-Human Voice”, where I shared my artistic exploration of machine and human voices on the Indian stage through works like Kaivalya Plays’ Lifeline 99 99, where strangers connected through telephone calls, and Mining Hate, an interactive documentary performance where we used machine voices to bring alive hate speech and misinformation from anonymous trolls online. I also talked about the larger questions raised by generative AI on the performing arts, particularly the nuances of machine-generated voices trying to sound more human with each successive new model. The audience also shared their own perspectives on the politics of speech, the risks and rewards of generative technologies, and how cultural contexts shape the reception of such work. The questions that emerged—on the burden of the human voice in a post-digital world, on the politics of accents, and on the ethical dilemmas of TTS and voice cloning—is something that I carry into my larger artistic practice this year. I tried cultivating a non-Western, postcolonial lens in talking about these technologies in the Indian context, where one half of the world sees us as the brink of the technology revolution and the other half sees us as the ‘backend’ economy for Western pursuits.



Over four days, I also met with fellow artists, researchers, technologists, engineers and designers who had varied perspectives on this topic, especially reckoning with the role of artificial intelligence in the creative process. The festival itself was an experience, with diverse talks, workshops, ambisonic concerts and so much more happening. Interactive installations and immersive concerts ranged from abstract soundscapes (many incorporating the machine as sound) to deeply narrative-driven works, and every piece challenged the audience to think differently about how we experience sound and image.


My visit to the festival was supported by an international bursary by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). I’m so grateful for this opportunity that allowed me to share my work with an international cohort of artists looking at sound and image from a critical lens. Building on this experience, I aim to deepen my exploration of the ethical and narrative dimensions of generative AI in performance, with a focus on amplifying non-Western perspectives. I plan to create cross-cultural projects that interrogate global narratives around voice, identity, and technology. Hopefully the connections formed at the festival will enable future collaborations.


Lastly, a big thank you to colleagues at the Centre for Sound and Image for their warm hospitality and support. I hope to be back very soon.

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