Hi,
For the last few months I have been helping my friends Rodney Glick (Artist) and Moshe Y Bernstein (Rabbi) with the technical aspects of one of Rodney's artworks. The artwork, entitled "Master Of Prayer" will be showing among many other fascinating works in Rodney's exhibition. It opens tommorrow night (Thursday), 6pm at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery at the University of Western Australia. I'm really excited about this project. I got to use Pure Data, voice synthesis (mbrola), and a network based pseudo-AI (Pd) to help Rodney and Moshe create a really compelling and thought provoking artwork. Here's the blurb that Moshe wrote about it:
"In the Jewish tradition the full prayer service can be performed only in a quorum of ten adult males known in Hebrew as a minyan. The main part of the service, which occurs three times daily, is the Shmona Esrei, or Eighteen Benedictions. These blessings are first recited silently by the entire congregation. Afterwards, during the morning and afternoon liturgies, they are repeated aloud by the cantor, often referred to as the Ba'al Tefillah or 'Master of Prayer'. In orthodox Judaism any male, whether layman or cleric, over the age of thirteen can lead the prayers. During the repetition of the Shmona Esrei, also called the Amidah, or 'standing prayer', the congregation answers responsively to each of the benedictions recited. In this installation each computer has been individually programmed to respond to the blessings recited by the main computer, the 'Master of Prayer', leading the afternoon Mincha service. Though the installation appears to parody the human condition of prayer by rote, on a deeper level it asks a haunting question about the inherent nature of artificial intelligence. The Jewish sages require kavannah, or 'proper intent' for prayer to be truly acceptable. To the extent that computers can be programmed to 'think', might they not be programmed to this 'proper intent' as well? In a tentative answer to that question, 'Master of Prayer' can be experienced as a high-tech, Jewish version of the Tibetan prayer-wheel or Christian rosary beads."
Good night,
Chris.
I suppose that question depends on whether they believe in silicon heaven. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=silicon+heaven
Thought provoking though. Does that mean the installation is doing voice recog?
On Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:17:11 +0800 Chris McCormick chris@mccormick.cx wrote:
Hi,
For the last few months I have been helping my friends Rodney Glick (Artist) and Moshe Y Bernstein (Rabbi) with the technical aspects of one of Rodney's artworks. The artwork, entitled "Master Of Prayer" will be showing among many other fascinating works in Rodney's exhibition. It opens tommorrow night (Thursday), 6pm at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery at the University of Western Australia. I'm really excited about this project. I got to use Pure Data, voice synthesis (mbrola), and a network based pseudo-AI (Pd) to help Rodney and Moshe create a really compelling and thought provoking artwork. Here's the blurb that Moshe wrote about it:
"In the Jewish tradition the full prayer service can be performed only in a quorum of ten adult males known in Hebrew as a minyan. The main part of the service, which occurs three times daily, is the Shmona Esrei, or Eighteen Benedictions. These blessings are first recited silently by the entire congregation. Afterwards, during the morning and afternoon liturgies, they are repeated aloud by the cantor, often referred to as the Ba'al Tefillah or 'Master of Prayer'. In orthodox Judaism any male, whether layman or cleric, over the age of thirteen can lead the prayers. During the repetition of the Shmona Esrei, also called the Amidah, or 'standing prayer', the congregation answers responsively to each of the benedictions recited. In this installation each computer has been individually programmed to respond to the blessings recited by the main computer, the 'Master of Prayer', leading the afternoon Mincha service. Though the installation appears to parody the human condition of prayer by rote, on a deeper level it asks a haunting question about the inherent nature of artificial intelligence. The Jewish sages require kavannah, or 'proper intent' for prayer to be truly acceptable. To the extent that computers can be programmed to 'think', might they not be programmed to this 'proper intent' as well? In a tentative answer to that question, 'Master of Prayer' can be experienced as a high-tech, Jewish version of the Tibetan prayer-wheel or Christian rosary beads."
Good night,
Chris.
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On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 03:36:44PM +0100, Andy Farnell wrote:
I suppose that question depends on whether they believe in silicon heaven. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=silicon+heaven
Heheh, and whether they dream of electric sheep.
Thought provoking though. Does that mean the installation is doing voice recog?
No, nothing so sophisticated. The 'Master of Prayer' is reading from a textfile script and communicating with the others over a LAN using Pd's netsend/netreceive. The artist, Rodney Glick, specifically chose blue cables over wifi so that observers were aware that they were communicating with eachother like that. One thing that he really pushed for was for the voices to be synthesised each time, not just played back wav files. So this means that the computers are actually translating the text into speech on the fly more like humans would. I used Mbrola for that because it was the only speech sythesiser I could find that would do the Hebrew language. Moshe, the rabbi, had to spend many hours transliterating the hebrew prayers into a pseudo-TTS textual language which is then massaged into .pho files for Mbrola using a Python script that I wrote. The hebrew text is scrolled along side the strange transliteration language on the screen as the computers read their prayers. Apparently the computers have a quite distinctive French-Israeli accents due to the Mbrola database used. :)
The call and response thing, and the monotone of the computer voices (which I arranged on the Phrygian Dominant scale) is really quite spooky to witness. I'll try and get some video of it.
Best,
Chris.
On Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:17:11 +0800 Chris McCormick chris@mccormick.cx wrote:
Hi,
For the last few months I have been helping my friends Rodney Glick (Artist) and Moshe Y Bernstein (Rabbi) with the technical aspects of one of Rodney's artworks. The artwork, entitled "Master Of Prayer" will be showing among many other fascinating works in Rodney's exhibition. It opens tommorrow night (Thursday), 6pm at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery at the University of Western Australia. I'm really excited about this project. I got to use Pure Data, voice synthesis (mbrola), and a network based pseudo-AI (Pd) to help Rodney and Moshe create a really compelling and thought provoking artwork. Here's the blurb that Moshe wrote about it:
"In the Jewish tradition the full prayer service can be performed only in a quorum of ten adult males known in Hebrew as a minyan. The main part of the service, which occurs three times daily, is the Shmona Esrei, or Eighteen Benedictions. These blessings are first recited silently by the entire congregation. Afterwards, during the morning and afternoon liturgies, they are repeated aloud by the cantor, often referred to as the Ba'al Tefillah or 'Master of Prayer'. In orthodox Judaism any male, whether layman or cleric, over the age of thirteen can lead the prayers. During the repetition of the Shmona Esrei, also called the Amidah, or 'standing prayer', the congregation answers responsively to each of the benedictions recited. In this installation each computer has been individually programmed to respond to the blessings recited by the main computer, the 'Master of Prayer', leading the afternoon Mincha service. Though the installation appears to parody the human condition of prayer by rote, on a deeper level it asks a haunting question about the inherent nature of artificial intelligence. The Jewish sages require kavannah, or 'proper intent' for prayer to be truly acceptable. To the extent that computers can be programmed to 'think', might they not be programmed to this 'proper intent' as well? In a tentative answer to that question, 'Master of Prayer' can be experienced as a high-tech, Jewish version of the Tibetan prayer-wheel or Christian rosary beads."
Good night,
Chris.
Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
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Chris McCormick