Installation | Tina Tallon: “yammer”

yammer is an interactive audio installation and performance environment that questions the ambiguities and limitations inherent in attempts to describe and represent music and other complex human expressive sonic events using commonplace ontologies in audio classification systems and large language models. Live audio produced by visitors to the installation undergoes audio classification using YAMNet, and an immersive soundscape is created by combining the live audio input with playback and processing of members of the AudioSet dataset belonging to the same putative audio event classes, often to humorous and nonsensical ends. Ultimately, yammer entreats those engaging with the installation to question not only the datasets used in audio classification, but also the datasets underlying many other models with which they may engage on a daily basis. Additionally, it questions the artistic utility of text-to-sound and text-to-music models, and the role of embodied cognition in musical artificial intelligence.

About the artist

Tina Tallon. Winner of the 2022 Rome Prize in Composition, Tina Tallon is a creative technologist and composer exploring AI’s impact on art and society. Her music and installations have been presented by leading ensembles and presenters worldwide, from the LA Philharmonic to the Venice Biennale and NeurIPS. She has earned honors from institutions such as Harvard, MIT, the American Academy in Rome, the Barlow Endowment, and ASCAP. Tallon is Assistant Professor of AI and Composition at Ohio State University.