Talk Back Pool

interactive sound piece for one or more computers by Sonja van Kerkhoff, 2006

Talk Back Pool, made in MAX/MSP, February 2006, in a LIACS (Leiden Institute for Advanced Science) Lab, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.



A constant flow of softly spoken words pour out from both computers.

"Think of a word
and press a key"


are the only necessary instructions.

A pool of random words heard when there is no interaction.

The extra button adds extra layers of these random sounds.

If a letter is pressed then a word that begins with the same letter is heard from a small pool of random options.

Each time any letter is pressed new words might be heard.

At the same time a message is sent to a second computer which results in a word also being heard, but it has been filtered to sound deeper, more echoey and flatter in tone. It still sounds human but has a sense of sharpness and distance associated with the voice.


50 seconds on the 1st of February 2006, where you hear the results of performers at two computers connected to a network.


This work is a play on meaning and abstraction. You hear softly and evenly spoken words streaming out in any order and you can listen to it like sound poetry or a meditation. When you press a key a louder word is heard in what seems an intimate space. You could hit the keys to make strings of words, units of meanings perhaps.
There is some level of control in that if you choose the A key, you will hear words beginning with the letter A, but my idea was that people would tend to play the keys like a piano keyboard, and listen for a succession of sounds affecting each other.

Here I took words from James Joyce's book, Ulysses because a main theme in his writing, as I see it, was to investigate what structure or the random, or in other words, meaning and abstraction.



Ulysses starts out as a narrative set on Bloemsday (the second thursday in June, a celebratory Irish Catholic festival of beds of flowers - which in the year I was born, was also my birthday, - coincidence or providence?).







The narrative then breaks down conceptually as much as it does linguistically.

So it seemed fitting to use his book as my source for this pool of words which are generated randomly after a human hand has first made a selection on the keyboard.

The words seem to talk back to you.

Talk Back Pool, made in MAX/MSP, February 2006, in a LIACS (Leiden Institute for Advanced Science) Lab, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.



the medium		art by catagory

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last things first