Fonología y fonética forense

Last year’s Hello Barbie chatbot toy sent all your kid’s speech to cloud servers operated by Mattel and its tech partner, but only when your kid held down Barbie’s listen button – new chatbot toys like My Friend Cayla and the i-Que Intelligent Robot are in constant listening mode – as is your “OK Google” enabled phone, your Alexa-enabled home mic, and your Siri-enabled Ios device – and everything that is uttered in mic range is transmitted to Nuance, a company that makes text-to-speech tech (you probably know them through their Dragon-branded tools), and contracts to the US military.

In a new FTC complaint filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), and Consumers Union argues that the toys license-agreements and cloud-based listening violate a variety of laws, especially laws protecting children from online data-collection. The way that the manufacturers try to finesse this is really laughable – as in I snorted aloud when I read it.

These artists found ghostly imagery in sound vibrations.

In the late 18th century, German physicist and musician Ernst Chladni demonstrated how vibrations could be used to create striking imagery. By spreading fine sand across the top of a metal plate and running a violin bow alongside, Chladni showed that the sand would settle into distinct patterns, depending on the frequencies of the sound waves produced by the bow.

Centuries later, in the 1960s, a Swiss physician named Hans Jenny built on Chladni’s experiments in an effort to study vibrational phenomena—what he called “cymatics.” Visual artist Jeff Louviere happened upon the works of Jenny and Chladni while researching another project, and he and his partner, photographer Vanessa Brown, became inspired to conduct their own experiments to see what sound could look like. The resulting work became Resonantia (Latin for “echo”), a multimedia project centered around 12 images produced by vibrations.