The Promise and Peril of AI Voices: Custom Speech, Identity, and the Future of Music Creation w/ Steph Ceraso, and Hussein Boon

Help grow the show: Subscribe to Phantom Power Join our Patreon and get perks + merch Rate us easily on your platform of choice Today we hear two scholars reading their recent work on artificial intelligence. Steph Ceraso studies the technology of “voice donation,” which provides AI-created custom voices for people with vocal disabilities. Hussein Boon contemplates the future of AI in music via some very short and thought-provoking fiction tales. And we start off the show with Mack reflecting on how hard the post-shutdown adjustment has been for many of us and how that might be feeding into the current AI hype.   For our Patreon members we have “What’s Good” recommendations from Steph and Hussein on what to read, listen to, and do. Join at Patreon.com/phantompower.  About our guests: Steph Ceraso is Associate Professor of Digital Writing & Rhetoric in the English Department at the University of Virginia. She’s one of Mack’s go-to folks when trying to figure out how to use audio production in the classroom as a form of student composition. Steph’s research and teaching interests include multimodal composition, sound studies, pedagogy, digital rhetoric, disability studies, sensory rhetorics, music, and pop culture.  Hussein Boon is Principal Lecturer at the University of Westminster. He’s a multi-instrumentalist, session musician, composer, modular synth researcher, and AI researcher. He also has a vibrant YouTube presence with tutorials on things like Ableton Live production.  Pieces featured in this episode:  “Voice as Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity” by Steph Ceraso in Sounding Out (2022).  “In the Future” by Hussein Boon in Riffs (2022).  Mack also mentioned in his rant:  “Embodied meaning in a neural theory of language” by Jerome Feldman and Srinivas Narayanan (2003).  “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor” by George Lakoff (1992).  Today’s show was produced and edited by Ravi Krishnaswami.  Transcript [7:22]: Steph Ceraso, Voice As Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity [24:10] Hussein Boon, Public Access File Trading [26:26] Hussein Boon, Better Than Mininum Wage: Working For The Man  [30:10] Hussein Boon, Tinkering At The Edges Ethereal Voice: This is Phantom Power. [Ethereal Music] Steph Ceraso: We must treat voice holistically. Voices are more than people, more than technologies, more than contexts, more than sounds.  Understanding voice means acknowledging the interconnectedness of these things and how that interconnectedness enables or precludes vocal possibilities. [Ethereal Music Fades] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices