The Uncanny Valley of Breath

What does a breath mean to a machine?

Antony Nevin, Carlotta Aoun, Cormac Patrick English, Edward Storey

When we talk to a machine, we don’t provide it with polished packets of information that it can analyse. Instead, we send it a chaotic bundle of vibrating air that must be searched for recognizable patterns. For an AI trained in Natural Language Processing, the way humans breathe when talking is useless – an undecipherable complexity. 

The Uncanny Valley of Breath strips away all of the processing that machines do to show us the variety in human speech in its most basic form: as a visualisation of frequencies, extracted from our speech, projected onto walls of spinning fans simulating the airflow that generated them.

Commissioned by Science Gallery Dublin and created with ADAPT, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for AI Driven Digital Content Technology.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

This work is a collaboration between trans-disciplinary artists Antony Nevin and Carlotta Aoun and ADAPT Center researchers Cormac Patrick English (UCD) and Ed Storey (Trinity College Dublin). Both artist's practices cross the boundaries between Art, Science and Design. While Antony focuses on how biomedicine can be investigated, materialized, translated and transformed through creative technology, Carlotta explores how technology blends with organic structures, creating mutations and transformations in bodies, psyches and machines. They found a mutual interest in the intersection between breath and tech, which aligned with Cormac and Ed's own research in the field of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Specifically, Cormac is concerned with exploring possible accommodations of accents within ASR systems while Ed investigates bias existing in ASR systems, with current research focusing on accented English.