Voice recognition, electronics & live art interaction

Voice-Triggered Flame Installation

I first developed the flame-control system for Danish artist Jens Galschiøt’s Ilddrager: a large-scale work with eight dragons firing columns of flame. Later, he commissioned a voice-triggered version for a Lions Club art exhibition in Kerteminde. Visitors spoke “Lions Club” into a microphone and the system triggered a flame.

The interaction was programmed in Max/MSP using a trainable English-language speech-recognition library, custom electronics and control software. A key challenge was handling varied Danish pronunciations of an English phrase; I tested and trained many phonetic variants, along with alternative trigger words, to make the interaction as robust as possible in a public setting.

CLIENT   Artist Jens Galschiøt  ·  CONTEXT   Lions Club art exhibition, Kerteminde

ROLE   Interaction design · Voice-interface design · Max/MSP programming · Speech-recognition training · Electronics · Physical computing · Flame-control integration · Prototyping & safety testing