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 elements 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 models with which they may engage with on a daily basis. Additionally, it questions the artistic utility of text-to-sound and text-to-music models.