Love Songs

Violet Eileen

A City is Nothing

  1. Love Song No. 1 (3.17)

  2. Love Song No. 2 (3.00)

  3. Love Song No. 3 (3.38)

Release Date:  July 19, 2024 

Andrew Stout: Voice cloning, text generation, TR-817, TC-50, TCM-100, TPS-L2, Spectravox, Subharmonicon, Mother-32, DFAM, Grandmother, Etherwave, VL-1, Microcosm, Sample Alchemy 
Recorded, mixed, and mastered at A City Studio, Portland, Oregon, May 1-June 29, 2024

Connection

Over

Connectivity

Where does our identity end? Where does our essence begin?

The limits of artificial intelligence offer real world, demonstrable hints of what makes us who we are.

Using AI, I cloned my late mother’s voice from an archive of messages recently discovered in my iCloud Drive. 

Then I asked twelve chatbots to define love, generating content for mom’s voice clone. 

I recorded the clone’s speech to cassette tapes and incorporated them into my studio rig, consisting of obsolete electronic music and communications technology from the 20th century, including voltage-controlled synthesizers, tape loops, a VFO-controlled two-watt tube transmitter, transistor radios, calculators, and an electromagnetic field generator.

The conclusions I came to (which are only the start of this inquiry) are these:

  • Everything about us that can be extracted into a learning system and abstracted for use as a tool is part of our identity.

  • Everything within us that can be known without being named—that refuses entry into a data set—is our essence.

When used in tension with AI, analogue devices—such as those that comprise my studio—sketch a lineage of communications history showing centuries-long trendlines favoring increasing miniaturization, mobility, and personalization of tools, to the extent that technological intimacy—or the sensation of feeling known and seen by a device—heightens our sense of isolation from others. In other words, connectivity disrupts connection.

As such, Love Songs continues my work’s longstanding subject: the symbiotic relationship between presence and absence.

Graphics for the series were generated  by prompting Gemini: “Please show me a picture of love.”