The main idea behind this piece is to represent and tell musically the interactions that take place between people and interactive systems, such as telephone answering machines. This work draws inspiration from the language philosopher Roman Jackobson, especially from what he defines the “phatic dimension”. This communication refers to the channel used: “Hello, who is speaking?”. ” These are phrases that we use to establish and maintain a communicative contact through a channel. I created a database of sentences from answering machines of the main Italian telephone operators, to have a material that is well known by everyone in Italy. Later I divided the recordings into fragments of sentences that can be combined with each other. A sampler plays randomly the sentences pieces, combining two of them. Thanks to the database structure, I obtain an Italian correct sentence each time. The sampler randomness is guided by data that come some European cities temperatures. I did this because talking about the weather with strangers is what Jackobson defines “phatic dimension”. The piece wants to describe the surreality of certain interactions that we could have with interactive answering machines.
