Voice Recognition for Performance Poetry Pedgogy

This provocation shares findings from the use of a bespoke voice-recognition performance system in a number of seminars for under-graduate and post-graduate students, which took place in the 2014-16 academic years at Glasgow School of Art, University of Warwick, and Falmouth University. The software introduced in the study is a web-app (coded in HTML and Javascript) which uses Google Chrome’s native voice recognition function ‘webspeech’(Google 2014). It can be used as a digitally augmented performance tool for poetry and has been adapted for use in teaching by emphasising certain formal constraints and characteristics. The software projects an animated computer generated transcript of a poem read into a microphone, alongside samples of that text remixed according to a number of programmable variables. The primary aims of this provocation are to introduce the software and its initial application, and to encourage educators to develop further applications for their own teaching practice