Microphone / Megaphone

A collective choral poem installation in the Serpentine Pavilion by Es Devlin and res.lab.



We celebrate Architect Frida Escobedo’s Serpentine Pavilion by creating a voice installation to compliment her subtle interplay of light, water and geometry.

The sound of every donated word is analysed in real-time based on pitch, duration and volume, and in response, a unique choral sound response is heard. Each spoken word passes through a poetry-generating algorithm, trained on twenty-five million words of c19th poetry. The algorithm generates a two-line poem from each word gathered into a cumulative choral work of human and machine-generated voices.

After five hours of collecting words from the public, the final audiovisual piece bursts into life, with vocal melodies soaring and building into an elaborate choir, immersing the audience in a forest of spatial sound and generative poetry.

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