Barbara Ellison

CyberSongs is a transhuman song cycle for human-like computer voices by composer/artist Barbara Ellison.With this new work Ellison delves in into the sonic intricacies of voice avatars and the musicalisation of TTS (Text-to-speech), a type of speech synthesis application that is used to create a spoken sound version of raw text in a computer document. In the 13 tracks of this album, she creates hypnotic textures of vocal utterances through the intensive and extensive use of repetition, as tools and materials to give rise to surprising audible phenomena of a fascinating and odd musicality.In the obsessively phantasmatic trans-human song cycle of the CyberSongs, words, morphemes, phonemes, phrases and speech particles acquire constantly-shifting new aural meanings. Unlimited by the speed of articulation these beyond human voices, in a range of different languages, feature and embrace glitches and artifacts that are a result of a process of pushing the limits of the technology. These voices are finally set within an electronic sound environment, with references to real-world instruments, that can be described as having an off-kilter jazz or pop aesthetic.Barbara Ellison has appeared previously on Unsounds in the volume of texts and music Things that a mutant needs to know (2013).