Messa di Voce

At the exhibition from September 1, 2018 to June 2, 2019

Utterly wordless, yet profoundly verbal, Messa di Voce is designed to provoke questions about the meaning and effects of speech sounds, speech acts, and the immersive environment of language.

Messa di Voce is an audiovisual system in which the speech, shouts, and songs produced by two vocalists are radically augmented in real time by custom interactive visualization software. The installation touches on themes of abstract communication, synaesthetic relationships, cartoon language, and writing and scoring systems, within the context of a sophisticated and playful virtual world.

Levin and Lieberman’s software transforms every vocal nuance into complex, subtly differentiated, and highly expressive graphics. These visuals not only depict the users’ voices, but also serve as controls for their acoustic playback. While the voice-generated graphics thus become an instrument upon which the users can perform, body-based manipulations of these graphics additionally replay the sounds of the users’ voices – thus creating a cycle of interaction that fully integrates the visitors into an ambience consisting of sound, virtual objects, and real-time processing.

(Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman)