Points of Articulation

Seth Scott
2025-26

This proposal is for a fixed composition. The piece will be completed in August 2026.

Introduction

Points of Articulation is an artistic research project exploring the politics and poetics of synthesised speech. It takes as a starting point the deep history of speech synthesis, which has roots in classical antiquity and encompasses West-African percussion music, Medieval literature and Renaissance automata, as well as modern day innovations in robotics and AI. The history of speaking machines and our changing attitudes towards them illuminate a longstanding fascination with animating the inanimate; through creative engagement with these tools I hope to explore complex and timely questions about technologies of knowledge production and the human body.

We live in a cacophony of artificial voices; a chorus of ‘smart’ assistants, customer service avatars, navigation systems, advertising voiceovers and deepfakes which become more difficult by the day to distinguish from the real thing. Whilst the ubiquity of these digital, incorporeal voices is reasonably new, fantasies of artificial bodies are not; they featured in Hellenistic scientific writing and mythology, in literature and historiography in the Middle Ages, and they began to take shape in Renaissance Europe in the form of sophisticated and imaginative automata. Tales of celebrated scholars combining arcane knowledge, technical innovation and diabolical magic to create clairvoyant talking heads illuminate complex relationships between nature and artifice, mechanics and magic, and between different types of intelligence and knowledge in pre-modern thought. They also resonate, I think, in quite an uncanny way with current discourse around technology, the body, creativity and labour in the wake of recent developments in machine learning and generative AI. In Points of Articulation I weave together historical and contemporary narratives, using sound and music to explore the politics and poetics of synthesised speech.

Proposal for Radiophrenia 2026

My proposed piece is an experimental radio drama based on the Elizabethan stage play ‘The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay’, about a scholar who makes a Faustian pact with the devil to make a brass statue speak. Written as a continuous monologue to be read aloud by a synthetic voice, the narrative follows a neurotic and unstable Friar Bacon as he tries in vain to achieve his goal. The speech is an anachronistic mix of old and new, as are his various methods which are based on real historical examples including Wolfgang von Kempelen’s speaking machine, Hermann von Helmholtz’s vowel synthesizer, and modern-day neural networks. The spoken text will be accompanied by an electroacoustic musical score, composed from synthetic vocal sounds.

The initial research and development for this project was completed during an artistic research residency at IRCAM in Spring 2025, and the proposed piece represents the culmination of two year’s work.

Work in Progress

Click here to view a full draft of the script.

The musical parts of this project are still in the early stages of development, but you can listen to my pieces Primal Cuts and Burnout (Anatomy of Three Velocities) to get an idea of style / form. Below are some early compositional sketches made using synthetic vocal sounds: