9.26.2009

"Bicycle Built for 2,000"

Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey's Bicycle Built for 2,000 is among nine projects nominated for a 2010 transmediale Award. The project's description:
Bicycle Built For 2,000 is comprised of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon's Mechanical Turk web service [through which you can hire individuals around the world, often for pennies per time, to perform small online tasks]. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard.
When aggregated, all these recordings make up a curious rendition of Harry Dacre's 1892 "Daisy Bell," the "bicycle built for two" song. The project site says the song "was made famous in 1962 by John Kelly, Max Mathews, and Carol Lockbaum as the first example of musical speech synthesis. In contrast to the 1962 version, Bicycle Built For 2,000 was synthesized with a distributed system of human voices from all over the world."

Via @vagueterrain

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