The ancient art of falconry is the practice of taking wild quarry in its natural state with a trained bird of prey. Falconers must work with their birds daily, and many hours of training, feeding and care may result in a few exhilarating moments of watching the bird hurtle towards the earth at over a hundred and fifty miles per hour to make a kill.
I have found in falconry a pattern that is similar to the pattern in the work I am currently creating. This work is based on the relationship between humans and computers mediated by voice-recognition software. I am concerned with the poetics of making my computer understand my voice, and the elusive qualities of spoken language. It is not a search for the meaning of spoken words, but rather a shared meaning. The dialogue between my computer and I is intended to expose a fundamental aspect of language itself – meaning arises from common use. It is possible for a language to have only two speakers. I have trained my computer to understand my very particular mode of speaking, and I in turn can understand and interpret the flawed output it produces. Though no one else may understand our customized dialogue, based on our intimate understanding of each other’s flaws, perhaps we (my computer and I) can create a common discourse.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
– William Butler Yeats, excerpt from “The Second Comingâ€, 1921.
In Yeats’ poem, a rupture has occurred in an ancient practice, the partnership of man and beast through the art of falconry. Taming a wild creature to the extent that it becomes a hunting instrument that can be used by man takes years of practice, and this process is very much an exchange between man and bird. This exchange is captured quite nicely by an old adage in falconry: “who is training who?â€
The falconer’s cry must be heard to be effective; as the voice must be understood by the computer to produce a result. Any art or craft requires dedication, and any relationship between two radically different entities results in each partner shaping the other, and meticulously creating a shared understanding. Man’s relationship with beast or machine is an ongoing process, and much patience and training may result in some form of mutual dialogue between the two. To engage in these crafts also means one must understand the stakes: years of effort may yield little or no progress, and an error at a crucial moment may be catastrophic.
7 replies on “Congruent Patterns”
ahh, wonderful…to what degree do our computers, or our falcons train us? that should give us pause to consider the control we have over our machines, or any technology…an imagined control in many ways, particularly if we don’T pay much attention to the things we "use" and what we "use" them for. what do they use us for?
The Maltese were big fans of their Falcons – so much so they shot them all and they are no more.
I like that you relate the falcons to your work and bring in the Yeats bit. I often hear or read the lines:
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
But never with with entire passage. I suppose the Maltese had the passionate intensity – the irrational emmotion caused by too much sun. A different rupture results, perhaps.
One of my favorite poems ever. Your article in Spacing was excellent. Will you be leading the charge for a grassroots group to come in and support something so necessary?
I hope so.
What do you mean when you say "understand"? Regardless of how much you train your computer, I’m afraid it will never UNDERSTAND you. The software you use may well get better at transforming the sonic patterns of your speech into the actual words you were speaking, but this is not the same as understanding.
My dog understands my speech far more than a computer ever could. I can say "Do you want to go outside?" in several different ways – excited, blase, goofy, etc. – and she’ll always get ready to go.
Understanding is a component of sentience, and computers ain’t there yet. You may know your computer, but it will never know you. The bird will, though. And so does my dog. And she misses you!
"Understand" is the wrong word, it’s true. My computer doesn’t have any intelligence, but it does have memory, and is capable of "learning" about me. Every time I interact with it, it stores the information about my characteristics and is forming a profile about me, in this case, the "voice model". So while it’s far from understanding, it might be a primitive sort of learning, though, non?
I’m not sure sure I’d call this learning either, at least not in the human (or animal) sense. For instance, your software will never be able to learn the distinction between a handclap and your voice. It will always seek to turn the clap into a word.
For me, the idea of learning is predicated on independent initiative. Does the software adapt its recognition protocols on its own? Or must you constantly program your corrections into it? Can we equate a database that is constantly being added to with sentient behaviour? In other words, where does the agency lie? Is IT learning, or are YOU programming it?
It might also have memory, but not in any intelligent sense. The software’s memory is basically a database of sound files mapped to a given lexicon and perhaps programmed with a set of syntactical rules. Human (or animal) memory is more than this.
This is not to deny the odd, occaisionally beautiful, and sometimes prophetic poetics of speech recognition (an uglier, but more accurate, phrase would be sound-to-text transformation) software. Philosophically, though, I always try to resist the slide into anthropomorphising the machine, and the subtle technological determinism that gives rise to it.
it’s so cold.
happy birthday my dear…
xoxox
mir