Canada Ear

Projects > Canada Ear

2007

The software manual said "we consider this a misuse of our product and we will not respond to requests to improve performance". And yet, the job had to be done.

Canada EarI was approached by Kelly Phillips, an interdisciplinary artist, to write a program that would listen to the radio and count how many times certain words were uttered. Why did she want this information? For art:

This project, currently in its test phase, uses voice recognition software to "listen" to CBC am radio broadcasts over the internet, recording utterances of the words "Canada" and "Canadian" on a chronological graph. Eventually the program will monitor each of the 29 broadcast streams originating from Vancouver to Corner Brook. Over time the collated data will be compared to moments of local, national, and international significance such as Canada Day, the National Hockey league play-offs, or international crises such as 9-11. The surges and declines in the utterances of these words may indicate when Canadians are most and least self-conscious of their national identity in relation to time, specific events, and geographic location.

This was a fascinating project to get involved in, and this project had the highest research-to-work ratio of anything I've done — fully three-quarters of my time was spent figuring out what to do. The final program, once I wrote it, came out to just over a page of code.