I’ve never used artificial intelligence to help me make my pieces in the past. For this project I wanted to experiment with using AI generated text-to-speech voices to read out texts of collaborators asking me to do things for free or just generally demanding quite a lot for no pay. To test out voices I used an example from a night where I had just got off stage at a gig (at around 10pm), had already been in rehearsals for the whole day and had landed back in England from playing a gig in France at 3am the night before – I was absolutely worn out and needed to go home (and I had a large amount of equipment on me). I kept getting texts from one of the bands I’m in asking me to come straight to their rehearsal for an hour after I got off stage, I already explained to them the situation and that I was very worn out and couldn’t make it and had a lot of stuff to carry, but they kept pestering me and asking me to come. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it was a bit annoying, especially as I had already explained how I couldn’t make it.

I wanted to use different voices for the people texting me and myself, so I looked at websites that could do this. I (mistakenly) thought that it might be free/cheap to access these resources, however I started to discover that a lot of these text-to-speech bots were actually quite expensive to use (Google’s was £300 per year). I found a site called murf.ai which had a few free voices so I started playing around with a few. However, after a while I realised I had to pay to download them. I tried screen recording it but the sound wouldn’t record.

Instead I just decided to use the google translate text-to-speech voice. This isn’t ideal as I wanted multiple voices and this only came with one, however it is free and easy to use, and I could screen record it to capture the audio. I used one of the texts I received that night as a practice example:

This was ok, but I wanted to really emphasise the length of the last word, “meee”. So I put spaces in between the ‘E’s’ to make it more drawn out:

This had the desired effect. I will experiment with both and put them into my piece to see if they sound good. I’m still not 100% sure about this aspect of my piece, I don’t know if I want to include the bot voice, or any voice. Something purely instrumental may work better. However, I will give it a try as it could add something interesting.