Dialtone Disconnect

Dialtone Disconnect was a project I completed as part of the UKAI Factitious Residency in Toronto, Canada. This residency was generous supported by the Canada Arts Council. During the residency, I became interested in the emotional impacts of dialtones. Rings, busy signals, dropped calls, noice breaking up—-all of these sounds resonate with particular moments in our lives when this technology has failed us and forced us to lose another.

I trained an AI voice model on dialtones and and had it say phrases such as "I've lost you" and "I am alive but not alive" to evoke the blurred line of sentience and disconnect in AI technology. I then constructed a piece around it using my own voice and a large corpus of audio files. The result is a cacophonous, troubling piece which reminds us that AI voices need not be facsimiles of human voices, but can be built out of entirely new sonic grammars.

You can play the audio here: