Voices Jam

Grade

Worth 12% of final grade.

Deadlines

• Section A (Tuesdays): 6 February 2024
• Section B (Thursdays): 8 February 2024

If there is a serious need for an extension, contact your instructor at least 3 days before the deadline.

Brief

Using p5.speech and any other libraries you wish (just p5 + p5.speech is fine though), create a prototype that engages with speech either in terms of synthesis, recognition, or both.

Your prototype should explore a specific experience you’re interested in evoking or questioning, with the majority of your efforts going into this exploration rather than polishing the prototype or adding content. Three examples:

• Power dynamics between people and computers. You could invert this and have the computer tell the user what to do and what to say. You could make the user the boss but have them develop a weird empathy for the computer’s situation.
• Lost in translation. You could explore the difficulties around understanding other people (or computers) by playing with voice synthesis and recognition settings in different ways, perhaps language settings especially in this case.
• Technical difficulties. You could explore the ways in which voice recognition and synthesis are not ideal solutions to some kinds of interactions. Would you want to drive your car with voice input? Probably not. Would you want to perform surgery by telling a robotic arm how to move with a scalpel? Unlikely.

Make sure to explore a well-defined idea in your prototype. It could be funny, scary, emo, weird, or something else. Just make sure it’s at least a little surprising, we’re aiming for novelty here.

When coming up with your idea(s), start with the possibilities present in p5.speech and go from there. Try not to imagine a fantasy project and then to figure out how to make it. Start with the technical reality and turn it into something interesting.

Please follow the Style Guide.

Technical details

Feel free to create a repository only for this project, or to work in a subfolder of your cart263 repository. A dedicated repository is more in line with real life developers, but either is fine.

Inspiration

• Blade Runner: “Enhance”
• 2001: A Space Odyssey: “I’m sorry, Dave”
• Lost Highway: “I’m there right now”
• ENHANCE.COMPUTER by Nicole He
• Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney’s “Objection!” (You used to be able to shout “Objection!” on the Nintendo DS to raise an objection in court)
• … feel free to suggest more to the instructor to add them here.

Submission

Submit a link to your running prototype and a link to the project folder in your repository on GitHub on Moodle. Please check your runing prototype actually runs online and not just locally.

Evaluation criteria

See the grading rubric associated with this assignment on the Moodle.