Sinfonia Meccanica

A voice is just a familiar noise?

An experimental project that produced a series of sound recordings, an audiovisual performance, a book with a cassette, and a poster. Mechanical Symphony is a fantastical story of a machine learning to speak. The project reproduces the hypothetical monologue of a printing machine, whose task is to generate text, as it learns to communicate through sounds. What is a voice? What does noise mean? Can a machine create its own voice? In this bidirectional process, the machine’s ability to produce text is influenced by the characteristics of the sound. The work reflects on the digitalization of media: both sound and language are digitally manipulated, exploring the blurred boundaries between voice, noise, expression, and machine-generated communication.

The project was born in 2019 from the collaboration between sound artist Francesco Ameglio, co-founder of the audio collective Settete and the experimental label SØVN, and Archivio Tipografico. Using recordings of the printing machines at Archivio Tipografico, Francesco created a series of tracks, one for each selected machine. Studio 23.56, Archivio Tipografico’s in-house studio, contributed by developing a variable font designed to respond to sound stimuli—a single file capable of behaving like multiple fonts, altering weight, width, and shape. The typeface reacts to the manipulated recordings of the printing machines, allowing sound to shape the form of words and sentences in real time. Words emerge from moving black squares, while the type deforms and transforms, remaining legible for brief moments before completely distorting.