Collaborative Synthscapes from Words

Modular synthesizers have long offered endless possibilities for sound design, but have a large number of components to patch together and parameters to tune. This makes them complex to effectively explore for many. The system we have developed, which we call CTAG (Creative Text-to-Audio Generation), invites everyone to explore these creative possibilities by imagining sounds and intuitively describing them in words, from which it controls the synthesizer's parameters to create diverse, artistic renderings.

For this project, we propose to invite attendees to co-create a set of soundscapes using CTAG. In alignment with the theme of celebrating diversity, each of the soundscapes will be oriented around a simple but thought-provoking question. Possible prompts include, but are not limited to: what is a sound that reminds you of your childhood? What is a sound that you associate with your cultural identity? What do you hear when you think of home?

This project invites members of the public to provide their own answers to each of these questions as text inputs into the system. By enabling participants to explore and play with generated sounds, it also encourages users to consider the similarities and differences that animate this community-all through sound.