The artwork Swell (2003), by Tenhaaf with sound by Kamevaar, has a pod-like amorphous shape and affords the feeling to people that they are dealing with an entity. It has been dubbed by some interactants as a "baby" robot, despite the fact that it has no moving parts and only one ultrasonic distance sensor for detecting its environment (and thus is not robotic). But it has "baby talk" suitable for a machine: sound as pure signal, that could have no other origin than electronic signal flow itself. Interactants set off electronically-manipulated microphone feedback sounds when proximal to Swell - sounds that become louder and more intense when the interactant moves away and softer as she or he comes closer. The generated sounds are layered: several sounds playing at once generate the assault of noise, whereas a single sound is almost melodic. Through its sound, Swell both commands its space and directs people's movements; it is thereby perceived as having the potential to mature into a more autonomous entity. The idea of the work is not to elicit beliefs that one is seeing life emerging artificially, but rather to elicit a willingness to talk to this entity. Flo'nGlo [2005], also by Tenhaaf and Kamevaar, consists of two physical entities (Flo and Glo) that interact with one another in rudimentary conversation. Each of the two agents "vocalizes" using an embedded speaker and senses the other's acoustic articulations directly (as opposed to sensing the environment more generally). Flo's sound is a compellingly relentless flow of "scrubbed" source files (a quick movement back and forth in the timeline of the sound), whereas Glo occasionally articulates discernible words. Those words are her power: she causes Flo to shrink in consternation when she utters them, while otherwise her attempts to butt in on Flo's chatter are thwarted. After this back-and-forth has gone on for a while, Glo calls on her optimizing swarm algorithm, to the tune of a chorus of "granularized" voices. Upon convergence of the algorithm, the exchange begins again. The two voices are central to the agents' behaviour, not an add-on to it; this emphasizes that the affective domain which is generated by sound is not a flourish, but is at the core of elicitation and response. From this de-centralized behaviour, conversational turn-taking is emergent.
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