I’m fascinated by how sound “works”--how it creates unique mental images and emotional experiences for each individual listener. In my day job, I specialize in editing, layering, and manipulating sound in radio/podcast stories to help listeners focus attention, connect and empathize with characters, and spark curiosity about the world and our human experience. But a number of things have me questioning my place in the podcast industry these days: the increase of AI-based workflows; the move away from “open” technologies toward commercial/proprietary ones; and the financial and power imbalance between “makers” (producers/journalists/artists/writers/musicians) and owners of audio platforms and technology products. At the same time, I’m excited to intentionally misuse these new technologies in ways that maintain my voice as an artist, exploring new approaches to sound generation, audience interaction, and composition.

“The sounds I am listening to every night at first appear to be human voices conversing back and forth in a language I cannot understand. I find it difficult to imagine that I am actually hearing real voices from people not of this planet. There must be a more simple explanation that has so far eluded me.”

- Nikola Tesla, 1918

Inside the Spirit Radio is a reference to the seemingly supernatural voices Nikola Tesla heard through his early crystal radio receiver in an era where few others were broadcasting. The installation is a quadraphonic soundscape that responds to audio from a spatial microphone, which captures sound in three dimensions. Information about pitch, loudness, and spatial locations of sounds are extracted from the microphone, and this data transforms the soundscape’s compositional structure in real time. Meanwhile, “live voices” captured on this microphone are fed into several AI-based processes, which spit out completely new, synthetic sounds based on what they “hear.” So while you may hear disembodied voices, they’re not strictly speaking “alive.”

…or are they?