“The Moons are clear, clouds are thin,
Listening to the crickets around the walls.
Saddened by Autumn, Song Yu sings to the west wind.
The falling leaves broke my dream.
I count flowers on the ground.”
(月明云淡露华浓,倚枕愁听四壁蛩。伤秋宋玉赋西风。落叶惊残梦,闲步芳尘数落红。)
This is from the tradition Chinese Kun opera, which is one of the oldest extant forms of Chinese opera.
Our Project has focused on the relationship between Human and Machine, and we has integrated this piece of classic opera into the whole audio project.
Firstly, users will see the overall website with one word “月” （moon), after they click this word, they would see the whole original text for the 《玉簪记·琴挑·懒画眉》.
However, contrary to their expectation, the first piece is cut from the speech of Nixon.
If the Apollo mission failed, the President Nixon would have read that speech he had prepared in memory of the 11 Astronauts. We found this speech very ironic because the government has already prepared the memorial speech in case the astronauts have died. The possibility of death of 11 people seems to have been predicted, but they still continue to launch the spacecraft for the interest of the nation, during the time when Russia and the US vied for space supremacy. Therefore, in order to convey such ironic feeling, I use Adobe Audition to process the sound from Nixon into robotic effects, using the function from Audition.
By the way, I also find it convenient to do multitrack sound editing in Adobe Audition.
Then users will hear the Google AI reading the meanings of certain word in an dispassionate way. We choose “月(moon)”, “蛩(crickets)” , “风（moon)”, “叶 (leaves)” as the ones we would like to present with their meanings in Chinese dictionary.
Then we integrated the background music that is related to these natural components with Google AI’s voice.
In this way, we would like to find a point that shows the conflicts between machine and nature, even though they seem to have been integrated well.
Then users will hear the sound we collected special similarity between machines and insects, therefore we put them together. We hope users will find certain connections between machines and nature from it. Then users will hear different integrations between the google AI and the natural sounds.
After the ending of this part, we guide the users to the Kun Opera part, they would hear a famous clip from Zhang Jun, a famous artist of Kun Opera. We add the transition sound effect that seems like users are listening to one cassette. The sharp contrast between Google AI and Kun Opera represents our exploration of Human & Machine.
Interestingly, in the final part, we choose to go back to the speech of Nixon, which echoes with the beginning of the project.
Human & Nature & Machine, may be the perpetual human theme in the post-Anthropocene.
