curated by Talia Golland
Building on the garbled speech experiments of #05, New Concept is an absurdist speech opera in five acts, each aligned with an HTTP response status code as a metaphor for miscommunication. The composition uses deep learning models trained on ESL textbooks and English speech datasets, shifting between rote language drills, machine-generated quasi-English, and fragments of lived expression. Presented in demo form, this soundwork reflects on how language mastery is framed in both education and AI, tracing how meaning is often reduced to statistical patterns, calling into question the fundamental bias in prevalent AI research that assumes all human experience can be fully captured through linguistic systems.