HTTLJ feat. The Voice
Interactive Installation, 2024
Tess Eschebach, Ziwei Li, Lola Obielodan, Tucker Rae-Grant, Helena Williams
Designed for CMSC 33218: Surviellence Aesthetics
December 2024
Motorized sliders, laser cut wood, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, 3-D printing, Python code, C++ code, speakers, microphone, monitor, sticky note, printed design
HTTLJ feat. The Voice, is an interactive installation that explores the border between ambient noise and private conversations. We played with this spectrum by developing a system that seeks to maintain audio privacy even as the visitor tries to eavesdrop. Meanwhile, they are secretly being recorded themselves and folded into the mix. This piece takes the form of a radio broadcast booth for a fictional station, HTTLJ. As “The Voice,” visitors are encouraged by passive-aggressive post-its to speak audibly during their “show.”
As a viewer tries to lower the volume on the soundboard by moving the sliders, the system calculates an “isolation” value to determine whether they are trying to listen to a single stream. In order to prevent this isolation, the system forces the altered sliders back to the top. The sixth slider insistently maintains its “off” position.
After 30 seconds, the positions of the sliders invert. At this point, viewers realize that they were being recorded during their “show,” and their voice, filtered out of the cacophony, plays clearly in the booth. The entire interaction session takes about 1 minute to complete.
The final exhibit installation consisted of a physical mixing board, a Blue Snowball iCE condenser microphone, and computer speakers. The mixing board was created with a laser-cut wooden console that housed six Arduino-controlled slider potentiometers with 3D-printed slider caps, and a red LED button. The programming for the physical interactions (Arduino), audio mixing (Pygame in Python), and live audio recording (Pyaudio in Python) was housed on a Raspberry Pi.
