Bicycle Built for Two Thousand
Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey
http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/
The song “Daisy Bell,” originally written by Harry Dacre in 1892, wasmade famous in 1962 by John Kelly, Max Mathews, and Carol Lockbaum as the first example of musical speech synthesis. In contrast to the 1962 version, Bicycle Built For 2,000 was synthesized with a distributed system of human voices from all over the world.
Bicycle Built For 2,000 is comprised of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard.
Aaron Koblin is an an artist specializing in data visualization. His work takes social and infrastructural data and uses it to examine cultural trends and emergent patterns. Aaron’s work has been shown at international festivals including Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, OFFF, the Japan Media Arts Festival, and TED. He received the National Science foundation’s first place award for science visualization and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
Daniel Massey is an artist, designer, and programmer based out of San Francisco, CA. Daniel’s recent work seeks to instigate new modes of collaboration, creation, and transformation by approaching technology as inherently malleable. His projects take on varied forms, from immersive installations and web-based work, to live visuals and music. Daniel earned his MFA in Digital Arts & New Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was part of the Yahoo! Design Innovation Team and is currently a resident artist at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.