Air reporters speak

We round off busy week with a delicious Eritrean meal on our last night at local restaurant Salam, with curator Liam. This is followed by a frantic final morning in the studio before we get a train back to London.

Our last compositional task is to get some of our voice script mapped to a couple of zones across the town centre. We want to hear our ‘Air Reporter’ speak in situ (our name for the future human characters who will speak to riders while they cycle the town listening to the air pollution) to hear how they suit the text, the locations, etc

After much exploration of text to speech voices this week trying to create a genderless human-ish but more than human future voice (from a mouthless being), who speaks with dynamic intonation not a monotone … we now have a library of voices of differing genders, ages and accents from around the world to test out on the streets. We squeeze in a final ride to hear these Air Reporters in action and they are sounding great! But we leave ourselves about 10 minutes to pack up the studio and get to the station without missing the train (thanks Jennie for sorting the taxi and making this happen!!)

We make the train (…) and head back to London for a wee fortnight before turning around and heading back up to Middlesbrough to finish and launch the piece.