hecker: synopsis seriation

What you hear in Synopsis Seriation, Hecker's latest album with Editions Mego, draws upon current research in machine listening and music information retrieval, where the "ghosts in the machine" are unsupervised convolutional operators designed to extract auditory features from a signal. Experimental deployment of these virtual listening agents has only just begun, and Synopsis Seriation advances a general research program Hecker initiated through a series of publications, performances and installations since 2013. In A Script for Machine Synthesis, the third chapter in the trilogy of text-sound pieces in collaboration with the philosopher Reza Negarestani, both a resynthesized and a computer-generated voice modelled after the narrators's voice, reflecting on systems of language, automatons and chimerized synthesis. Articulação Sintetico (2017) -- a complete resynthesis of Hecker's album Articulação  -- features synthetic voice models of Joan La Barbara, Sugata Bose and Anna Kohler. Central to Inspection II  is a bespoke computer-generated voice, reciting Robin Mackay's libretto -- by means of deep neural networks and machine listening computation, perpetually crossing formal anticipations of sound analysis to the unexpected artefacts of synthesis. Synopsis Seriation does away with such staging of computer-generated speech. It dramatizes synthetic sound in all its unnamable intensities and detail by transforming four multichannel pieces Hecker produced since 2015. These have been analyzed, dissected and reconstructed utilizing information geometry, a subfield of mathematics at the interaction between statistics and differential geometry, designed by Vincent Lostanlen. His scientific work is at the forefront of the movement of computational auditory analysis out of the frequency domain model toward a more complex understanding of the auditory landscape and perceptual processing. Written and produced by Florian Hecker, 2015-2020. Information geometry and sound computation by Vincent Lostanlen. Mastering by Rashad Becker