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Contents © 2020 Golan Levin and Collaborators

Golan Levin and Collaborators

Projects

Messa di Voce (Installation)

2003 | Tmema (Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman) with Jaap Blonk and Joan La Barbara

Messa di Voce (2003: Golan Levin, Zachary Lieberman, Jaap Blonk, and Joan La Barbara)augments the speech, shouts and songs produced by a pair of vocalistswith real-time interactive visualizations. The project touches on themes of abstract communication, synaesthetic relationships, cartoon language, and writing and scoring systems, within the context of a sophisticated, playful, and virtuosic audiovisual narrative. Custom software transforms every vocal nuance into correspondingly complex, subtly differentiated and highly expressive graphics. Messa di Voce lies at an intersection of human and technological performance extremes, melding the unpredictable spontaneity and extended vocal techniques of human improvisers with the latest in computer vision and speech analysis technologies. 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 exists in both performance and installation versions; more information on the performance version can be found here and at the official Messa di Voce web site. The installation version of Messa di Voce has been presented in more than 20 venues in twelve countries.

Additional Resources

Complete information about this project can be found at the official Messa di Voce web site.
High-resolution images of the Messa di Voce installation can be found at this Tmema Flickr photoset.
Video of the Messa di Voce installation in use at the 2005 ArtRock Festival can be viewed at YouTube.

Images (click to enlarge)