VA - Echohce (2006)

A... concert by David Link, FM Einheit and Jamie Lidell. Echohce is a project for a singer, musicians and a machine generating text. The singer speaks the title of the next song into the microphone to announce it to the audience. The song does not yet exist. The computer answers by generating a stream of associations related to the topic. The lyrics are printed on eight needle printers above the stage as they evolve. The singer selects text that seems meaningful to him and performs it together with the musicians. The text generator Poetry Machine used in this project is based on semantic networks. The program only contains routines to process text, no hardcoded datasets. It digests documents of human authors and extracts their associative interconnections. It's main source of information are the masses of text in the internet. Poetry Machine is part of the permanent collection of the Centre for Art and Mediatechnology (ZKM), Karlsruhe.