Season 2021 Episode 15 | 30m 39s | Video has closed captioning.
Visionary composer Paola Prestini explores the intersections of disability, artificial intelligence and voice in an experimental multi-sensory opera with choreographer Jerron Herman and poet Brenda Shaughnessy. Access: ASL, captions.
Aired: 03/08/22
♪♪ Welcome to "The First Twenty."
I'm James King.
In this episode, composer Paola Prestini takes us on a multi-sensory narrative journey woven together at the intersections of disability and artificial intelligence.
Through this piece, we'll explore two central questions.
The first, involving voice, asks, "What is the nature of voice beyond language?"
The second, involving artificial intelligence, asks, "How might artificial intelligence expand the possibilities for voice and expression?"
Consider these questions and more as you watch.
♪♪ Woman: ♪ Is being ♪ Prestini: ♪ Is being ♪ ♪ Or becoming only data ♪ ♪ No cumulative way to accrue meaning ♪ ♪ Enough for any of us?
♪ ♪ Flying and floating ♪ ♪ Are good enough ♪ ♪ For birds and clouds ♪ ♪ But we are people ♪ ♪ We are attached ♪ We are attached at many points.
Woman: ♪ We are attached at many points ♪ Prestini: What does it mean to truly hear one another?
To listen deeply, to try and understand?
To truly create together, to go beyond our singular selves and make something in community?
We must first start by listening, hearing one another, seeing one another, feeling one another, being with one another.
My name is Paola Prestini.
I'm a composer, and what drives me to create is making space, making space for beauty, for communication, and for connection.
♪♪ ♪♪ I think we're in a really interesting, complex moment in time, and so a lot of the kind of ways of working that deeply involve community and listening -- I think it's the only way to work when you're trying to get to the root or get to a deeper understanding of things, is to really do it in a collaborative way and to set up those processes in the best way you can.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ The story of "Sensorium Ex" is as much a story of what's happening in the opera as a story personally for me of finding a sense of home in my creative process and in other people who find the need for meaning and connection in artistic and creative co-collaborative processes.
It's been so long.
It's essentially Brenda and my work to bring to life something very personal to her, which is, you know, this idea of voice beyond language and an idea of, how do you really begin to -- to understand and to listen?
My name is Brenda Shaughnessy.
I'm a poet.
I think I became a poet because I wanted a voice.
I think the whole point of all the arts is to make people feel included, and that that voice that they're hearing includes them.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ I feel pretty determined to speak my mind.
And I have a child who I'm not sure is going to get the chance to speak his mind.
So I got to figure something out.
That's kind of what the whole point of the opera is -- trying to figure something out so that he can figure out what he wants to say.
So the opera asks the questions, "How central is language, how central are words to a person's total communication range, how much do we rely on words, do we overrely on words, do we expect language to do everything when really maybe we should be listening for other ways of communicating?"
Maybe there are other ways that language can mean outside of a typical storytelling construction, that maybe a story can be told in heartbeats, in melody, in synchronicity.
Herman: Lifeline.
Lifeline.
Lifeline.
Lifeline.
-A lifeline.
A timeline.
A long time.
A gone time.
Enough time.
A rough time.
Enough time.
A through line.
A true line.
In whose mind?
To use time.
To lose time.
In whose mind?
A through line.
A true line.
A true lie.
Did you lie?
End life.
End mind.
End time.
End time.
End line.
End life.
Begin life.
Begin time.
Begin time.
Begin time.
Begin time memory.
Begin memory.
Begin Mem.
I like that.
It works.
Yeah.
Oh, that's gorgeous.
That's great.
Yeah, that's good.
Prestini: And so when we began, it was really this idea of bringing to life through music, which, of course, it's also, I think, very interesting to think about agency and voice in opera, you know, which is a sung form, and how to begin to imagine all the possibilities for something as beautiful and as complex as this very personal story.
And, you know, finding deeper meaning to all these issues surrounding ability, disability, voice.
♪♪ ♪♪ And so the idea became how to kind of break into the opera moments where Kitsune is essentially always present, but also commenting, and how to do that becomes this idea of, what if I score aspects of the words into -- using the locution and the pattern of rhythm -- into a line of instruments that then is translated.
Woman: ♪ You speak the way a bird walks ♪ [ Bird chirping ] ♪♪ ♪ Like you have another way you're not ♪ ♪ Using ♪ ♪♪ [ Bird chirping ] ♪♪ ♪ You're choosing not to fly ♪ ♪♪ ♪ But it's not a choice ♪ ♪♪ ♪ It's your voice ♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Voice is self, but voice is self as a connecting cord to another person, to the rest of the world, to one's community, to one's society, to one's era, to one's family.
In many ways, my work with the libretto ceased to become my work when it was on the page.
It was the piece that suddenly became the cord, the voice that needed to be heard and given body to.
Something more profound happens where the self ceases to exist and the page, the words, the lyrics, the libretto has its own voice.
It's now being spoken through Paola's music, Jerron's choreography.
So thank you, thank you, thank you.
Self.
Then self -- We're gonna take it -- Self is going to go around the back of your neck.
Feel your neck.
Coming all the way over to your other ear.
And then self fly away from name.
And you just go again.
Shall we try that?
Once again.
Name, float away.
Goes down from face.
Face, fly away.
Bring it down to body.
Body, float away from mind.
Mind, float away from memory.
Memory, float away from self.
Self, fly away from name.
I'm Jerron Herman.
I'm a dancer, choreographer, writer, text-based artist based in New York City, and I largely make works that try and attempt to facilitate welcoming and images of freedom.
The nature of work of art is to embody abstract ideas, large ideas.
Well, voice is certainly a expression of embodiment.
There is a distinction to one's voice that is self-determined, is revealed to them, and is ever-changing.
And so I think that with respect to my voice, I try to recognize its place and its insert in a legacy of different disciplines and different -- and different aesthetics.
Personally, what I'm interested in is, like, revealing disability culture as, like, a framework that everyone dips into.
Like, even if you're non-disabled or outside the political ideation of disability, there are practices and realities and procedures and, like, embody -- you know, realizations that are open to you.
And personally, I really do want to craft a vocabulary that would be very specific to cerebral palsy and also not just cerebral palsy, but because I'm the choreographer, it's like, it's gonna be there, you know?
I'm not going to divorce it.
And so what is the translate -- Or what is the -- What is the generative element that I'm transferring to another body?
Life is a science.
Love doesn't drive it.
Desire is survival, if we survive it.
My world is root and leaf and what's inside the body.
A heart.
Desire.
They're my eyes.
I never needed sight.
I can see inside you when I hear you sing.
All I want is for you to sing.
I want this child to sing.
His wordless song of endless meaning means everything.
Your songs belong, and I belong to you.
Both: One moonless night, the doorstep.
Knight: Our bodies.
In the leaves.
On our knees.
A new life was made in our minds.
From our minds.
Who would believe a tree woman would see me?
Us?
Us.
His wordless song of endless meaning, your endless meaning.
Where next?
We don't have a choice.
Corp will harvest him, and he needs his FOXP2.
He can have it for all I care.
My child found his voice.
He doesn't need words.
He needs your words.
He doesn't belong to them.
Do we?
Do we belong to them?
Prestini: I think the biggest questions the opera is asking are, how can we create a space of understanding and listening so that we can hear all types of voices?
And what do we -- What kind of setups, what kind of contexts can we help create artistically and based in different community practices that can help us achieve a state of communal flow, a state of communal language?
In flow.
Exactly.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
In flow.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Martiny: The project is also bind together in a quest of trying to understand expressed voice, and that's where community and science and research get into it.
So how can we go from staging, from opera, to society, and how can we bring society back again to the stage?
My name is Kristian Martiny, and I'm a cognitive scientist, which means I work within psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and philosophy.
And the reason why I work in projects like -- like this "Sensorium Ex" project is because I believe both in different formats and different expression of knowledge, of experience, of impact and change.
That being that I think science has a huge way to contribute to culture, but arts and culture also has a huge way to contribute to science.
So when we go together in these collaborations, we actually give different kinds of expressions to some of the same sort of, say, phenomena or understanding of the world.
So one of the interesting sort of, say, both tensions, but also opportunities, in this project is on this personal and subjective identity -- the A.I.
bit, the technology side, and then voice.
And the reason why this is very interesting is because nowadays typically how you develop algorithms, how you "train" algorithms is based by data sets of normal speech patterns.
People with normal speech patterns.
But what if -- and this is a hypothesis in this project -- What if we were to actually include communities, include people that have different kinds of way of speaking?
Could we then train an algorithm which we and the opera are calling Sophia, an A.I., to actually be a collection of different ways of speaking, of different voices, and then train the algorithm, train the A.I., to actually come up with a new kind of voice, with a new way of being heard that not only gives an identity to the A.I.
in the opera, Sophia, but actually also translate back to a new identity of the people providing that voice, although it may be in different verbal speech patterns?
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ I think speech synthesis is really interesting, right?
Because it is historically this way to get your computer to talk to you.
But it turns out that, like, a much hipper thing to do with speech, right, speech synthesis, is to use it as a way to create and expand and elaborate on our own voices, right, and do creative things.
Martiny: It can end up here That's fine.
But it also has to end up in a social narrative that I am part of something bigger, or it has to end up in a creative process that is also music and words.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ And so as I began to think about the technology for that character, it became clear that that character needed to be an aggregate of the main characters in the opera, who represent joy and passion and love and communication and motherhood and science and all the things we hold dear, but that, in fact, because this is a communal opera, that -- that every place that we do the work and the workshops that those voice as data sets get aggregated into this character, so that by the end of the opera, when you only have Sophia, you're hearing Sophia, you're hearing Kitsune, you're hearing Mem, you're hearing Mycelia, and at the very, very end, you're hearing a chorus from around the world.
♪ Is being ♪ ♪ Or becoming only data ♪ ♪ No cumulative way to accrue meaning ♪ ♪ Enough for any of us?
♪ ♪ Flying and floating ♪ ♪ Are good enough ♪ ♪ For birds and clouds ♪ ♪ But we are people ♪ ♪ We are attached ♪ We are attached at many points.
And do you suppose it's possible?
Both: Name, float away from face.
Face, fly away from body.
Body, float away from mind.
Mind, fly away from memory.
Memory, float away from self.
Self, fly away from its name.
Prestini: From its key word.
Its identifier.
Its spot on the page.
Its page in the book.
Its book of the life of the person... We call you.
I met her once, Dr. Mem, my mother.
Only once in the lab.
I was too young to remember her who made me.
A lifeline.
A timeline.
A long time.
A gone time.
Enough time.
A rough time.
Enough time.
A through line.
A true line.
In whose mind?
To use time.
To lose time.
In whose mind?
A through line.
A true line.
A true lie.
Did you lie?
Herman: Lifeline.
Lifeline.
End life.
End mind.
End time.
End time.
End line.
End life.
Begin life.
Begin time.
Begin time.
Begin time.
Begin time memory.
Begin memory.
Begin Mem.
♪♪ Woman: You can't just... step in... through some brute force.
[ Electronic voice singing indistinctly ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Singing continues ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Electronic voice: ♪ We can't just step in ♪ ♪ Through some brute force ♪ ♪ We can't just step in ♪ ♪ We can't just step in through some ♪ [ Bird chirping ] ♪♪ ♪ We can't just step in through some ♪ ♪ Brute force ♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Singing indistinctly ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Singing continues ] [ Birds chirping ] ♪♪ Shaughnessy: My hope is that anybody who feels like they've been left out of the story feels like this is theirs.
They're hearing the music, they're seeing the opera, but they're also in it, and they're part of that trajectory, part of that narrative, and, you know, a thread in that cord that connects us.
So when we travel and interact with communities all around the world where we're investing in their gestures and investing in their culture, in a reciprocal way, they're feeding into this opera, as well.
It's my hope that they will see their own streets, their own gestures and cultures as its own opera, at its own piece of heightened and elevated work that is already there.
Prestini: I think that, you know, a great artistic experience translates the moment of flow that you've experienced in creating it to a being that then potentially sees themself in that work, right?
And that's what some of the greatest works of art will do, greatest works of theater will do.
"Sensorium Ex" is the kind of work that can't be done in a bubble.
It's a work that needs the communal expression of the communities in which it will be birthed.
These works reflect a way of working that I think, you know, reflect listening practices, reflect what it takes to collaborate across cultures, which is not easy.
You're talking about so many cross sections that the only way to do it deeply is to give it the time it needs.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Woman vocalizing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Prestini: ♪ Flying and floating ♪ ♪ Are good enough ♪ ♪ For birds and clouds ♪ ♪ But we are people ♪ ♪ We are attached ♪ We are attached at many points.
Woman: ♪ We are attached at many points ♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪
