Meesh Sara Fradkin - babbel

These two works offer some of what could have been with babbel—the first piece is a result of at least sixty of the sonified words manually triggered in a specific order, while the second is only one of the sonified words. In the gallery space, babbel presented unending combinations of sounds. But, whether or not it was activated outside of its idle mode was decided by the audiences’ personality (and whether or not they were speaking out loud with company). Sound design by Meesh Sara Fradkin. Captions by Cheryl Green in collaboration with Meesh Sara Fradkin. Transcriber’s note: babbel can be very layered in the gallery, and the first video presented as part of babbling can be too. The layers are made when two or more sounds are combined to play at the same time, creating a neat effect called “polyphonic sound”. In the first video, the captions fill up the screen and stack on top of each other to match. The words sometimes layer so much that it can be hard to read. The transcript below has the captions in the order they show up in the video, listing the start time of each caption, how long each caption lasts, and whether its color is fire-engine red, bright white, or emerald green. Times are listed in minutes and seconds.

Artist’s note: These two works offer some of what could have been with babbel—the first piece is a result of at least sixty of the sonified words manually triggered in a specific order, while the second is only one of the sonified words. In the gallery space, babbel presented unending combinations of sounds. But, whether or not it was activated outside of its idle mode was decided by the audiences’ personality (and whether or not they were speaking out loud with company). Sound design by Meesh Sara Fradkin. Captions by Cheryl Green in collaboration with Meesh Sara Fradkin. Transcriber’s note: babbel can be very layered in the gallery, and the first video presented as part of babbling can be too. The layers are made when two or more sounds are combined to play at the same time, creating a neat effect called “polyphonic sound”. In the first video, the captions fill up the screen and stack on top of each other to match. The words sometimes layer so much that it can be hard to read. The transcript below has the captions in the order they show up in the video, listing the start time of each caption, how long each caption lasts, and whether its color is fire-engine red, bright white, or emerald green. Times are listed in minutes and seconds. Transcript for video 2 : 00:00 (16 seconds, red): a high tone wiggles awake, then joined by a lower tone, each steady, they bump against each other. now, they merge and resonate like an old phone dial tone, a resonant chord. the high tone drops out, leaves the low tone a moment before silence. 00:16 (3 seconds, red): silence.