Talking Popcorn
Nina Katchadourian
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2001, Popcorn machine, laptop computer with custom-written program, speakers, paper popcorn bags with Morse Code, rubber stamp, salt shaker, plinth, and floor circle, 90 x 90 x 72 inches overall, Courtesy of the artist, Brooklyn, New York
2001, Popcorn machine, laptop computer with custom-written program, speakers, paper popcorn bags with Morse Code, rubber stamp, salt shaker, plinth, and floor circle, 90 x 90 x 72 inches overall, Courtesy of the artist, Brooklyn, New York
Talking Popcorn is a machine that listens to the sound of popping corn and translates it using Morse Code. Morse Code is a system of communication invented by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail in 1835 for use with the telegraph. The code represents letters of the alphabet and numbers with sequences of dots and dashes (or short and long signals). Most people who are familiar with it will think of a fast, syncopated pattern of long and short beeps. The first message, sent on a line between Baltimore and Washington on May 24, 1844, was "What hath God wrought!"
The computer program for Talking Popcorn was written by Josh Goldberg using Max/MSP, a computer program developed by Cycling ‘74. Since Morse Code consists of a system of long and short sounds, and popcorn only pops in short sounds, the first challenge we faced was how to overcome this disparity. I remembered that the doomed sailors on the Russian submarine Kursk had tried tapping out messages on the hull. If this was possible, it must be a matter of pacing the knocking differently in order to communicate long or short marks. This is in fact what Talking Popcorn does: it listens to a series of pops in a group, taking a running average of the amount of silence that follows each pop, and then designates each of those pops as a dot or a dash. Measuring the lengths of silence in groups also helps account for the acceleration that happens as the kernels heat up and pop at peak speed and density.
-Nina Katchadourian
The computer program for Talking Popcorn was written by Josh Goldberg using Max/MSP, a computer program developed by Cycling ‘74. Since Morse Code consists of a system of long and short sounds, and popcorn only pops in short sounds, the first challenge we faced was how to overcome this disparity. I remembered that the doomed sailors on the Russian submarine Kursk had tried tapping out messages on the hull. If this was possible, it must be a matter of pacing the knocking differently in order to communicate long or short marks. This is in fact what Talking Popcorn does: it listens to a series of pops in a group, taking a running average of the amount of silence that follows each pop, and then designates each of those pops as a dot or a dash. Measuring the lengths of silence in groups also helps account for the acceleration that happens as the kernels heat up and pop at peak speed and density.
-Nina Katchadourian