Judith Deschamps
.Biography
Judith Deschamps is a French multidisciplinary artist living between France and the UK and trained at the Haute École des Arts du Rhin in Strasbourg (2011), at the Royal College of Art in London (2018), and at the École Universitaire de Recherche ArTeC in Paris (2020). For the past three years she has been working on the voice, the various aspects of which have taken the form of sound and sculptural installations, and which are the result of performative gestures linked to the history and anatomy of the phonatory apparatus.
At the crossroads of several fields of knowledge, her practice leads her to collaborate with practitioners from various sciences and disciplines, and to exhibit in institutions such as the Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg; De Appel, Amsterdam; the Frac Grand Large, Dunkirk; the Centre Pompidou and the Museum of Art and History of Judaism, Paris; Mains d'Œuvres, Saint-Ouen; the Galerie Édouard Manet, Gennevilliers. She will begin a doctorate in the fall of 2021 at the École Universitaire de Recherche ArTeC, under the direction of Professors Arnaud Regnauld and Laurence Devillers.
.2020.21 Artistic Research Residency
Quell'usignolo che innamorato: The Resurgence of an Artificial and Deeply Plural Voice
Research Theme:
At the crossroads of contemporary art and research in transformation and synthesis of a singing voice.
Summary:
Recreation of Farinelli's voice and of a hybrid song by means of deep networks.
In collaboration with the Analysis-Synthesis team at IRCAM-STMS
Quell'usignolo che innamorato (this nightingale who is in love) is a song that the Italian castrato Farinelli is said to have performed for King Philip V of Spain every night for a decade to soothe his grief.
In the pursuit of IRCAM's project to recreate Farinelli's voice in 1994, this residency will draw on advances in vocal signal processing and deep learning to recreate the song in question. The aim is to train deep networks with the voices of singers performing at different pitches, and to develop methods to produce a hybrid chant, incorporating the specificities of each voice from external control parameters, or automatically, depending on the pitch sung.
At the intersection of the voice of a child, a woman and an adult man, we will try to express the plastic and protean character of Farinelli's voice, its variations, its nuances, and its different temporalities. The objective of this residency will be to explore the transformative potential of artificial intelligence, to create a fictional (not mimetic) voice. It will incorporate the "errors" and limitations of the technology used, in order to situate the transhumanist imagination invoked by this voice against the reality of its modes of production.