Honorable Speaker
“Western” society suffers from selective memory and selective heritage. This has resulted in ourselves and our designed objects having selective hearing, to the detriment of the voices and languages that most often need to be heard.
First year final solo project
Raspberry pi, tensorflow, upcycled mahogany, speaker
15cm x 15cm
2018
Raspberry pi, tensorflow, upcycled mahogany, speaker
15cm x 15cm
2018
Born out of my frustration at not being able to get a voice activated speaker to play Gqom, a burgeoning genre of music taking over London from Durban.
The Honorable Speaker is the first natural language processing device that recognises clicks and specifically the isiZulu word Gqom – a genre of music being popularised globally but originating in the City of Durban, Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa.
Drawing on the form of the ubiquitous Potjie (or Putu) pot, a much transculturated object, I deconstruct it in an attempt to undefine and reimagine my role as a designer in South Africa.
I collected 600 recordings of people saying the word Gqom which was used as training data for a a natural language processing neural network implemented using Tensorflow.
After training the neural network, the network was added to a Raspberry Pi and a custom built speaker system, handmade out of mahogany plates for better resonance.
The resut? The first natural language processing device that recognises clicks and can play some Gqom, when you want it to. The Honorable Speaker.
