salad bowl

salad bowl is an interactive neural sound installation where audiences are invited to co-create and co-mingle with “the salad” — a neural network trained on a diverse, eclectic collection of sounds. the salad is a heterogeneous mix of sound elements, each with its unique character, all contributing to a vibrant whole. The salad is a collective memory of the past sonic experiences of people, places, and things throughout the world, all encoded in a fuzzy possibility space.

In salad bowl, you can sit down at the dinner table. There’s a salad bowl and a microphone in front of you. You pick a piece of paper from the salad bowl. The piece of paper prompts you to make a sound with your voice. You make the sound into the microphone. The salad picks up the sound. The sound becomes part of the salad. The salad becomes part of the sound. The sound comes out warped. It’s perceptual identity has been transformed. The sound is no longer just your voice, but rather a view into the infinite possibilities that your sound could be, in the context of the salad.

To wildly transform the sounds put into the salad, the neural network takes the participant’s sound as input and destroys around 80-90% of it. It then looks at the missing pieces and creates its best guess of what was missing.

More than a mere exploration of generative sound modeling, salad bowl is a celebration of spontaneous, shared, and diverse human interactions with sound. salad bowl encourages multiple people to sit down together at the dinner table and engage in colorful sonic conversation. The result is not just an exploration of a generative model's internal representations, but also a celebration of spontaneous, shared, and diverse experiences of human interaction with sound.

salad bowl encourages people to think of -- and design -- generative AI systems as "salad bowls" not "melting pots". Unlike in a melting pot, where the identities of each individual member are lost in favor of a uniform whole, a salad bowl's ingredients are able to shine together while preserving their identity, creating a shared collective entity that embraces diversity, showcases unique beauty, and fosters a richer, multifaceted experience for all who engage with it.