Ghostly Voices

Ghostly Voices is an iterative collaborative songwriting experiment with spatial cues that we conducted with producer Lasse Martinussen and visual artist collective Uberørt. Inspired by the surrealist technique of the exquisite corpse, a game in which each participant adds to a composition without seeing the whole, we explored how such a process might unfold across sound, space, and visual media.

Thematically, it is a reflection on the world unraveling, marked by political imbalance, environmental collapse, digital isolation, and existential dread. Glitches, ghostly talking heads (AI, computers, or lost souls), and hormone-fueled overstimulation amplify the chaos.

Process

The process began with the writing of lyrics accompanied by imagined spatial sound instructions. These were sent to Lasse, who, drawing on our ideas of “circulating arpeggios weaving a web,” crafted an instrumental track. His production integrated glitch elements inspired by the lyrics.

Initial Spatial Imaginations

We then passed this audio material to 3D visual artist collective Uberørt (Louise Léssel and Nina Franziska), who translated the sonic glitches and arpeggios into fragmented, glitchy visual patterns. They were inspired by Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russel, describing a liberation in the glitch and that precisely in the glitch, a potential exists: It is in the glitch that we find space for change and innovation, and the irregular and unidentifiable. In the glitch, a break with the defined framework can be created, and new ways of seeing the world can be revealed—a place where we can create a new world order.

Visuals from Uberørt were sent back to us, triggering further conceptual work but this time on how to spatialize the sound files we had received. Responding to the glitch motifs from both sound and image, we began manipulating MIDI triggers from Ableton Live to control these glitches, asserting a form of authorship over dissonance.

Immersed in the emerging audio-visual universe, we developed a new set of lyrics—a fragmented reinterpretation of the originals—exploring themes of organic and synthetic hormones, further blurring the boundaries between human and machine, intention and accident.

We explored the character and formant/pitch of the voices extensively, aligning them with the theme of a hybrid character—something between human and machine. We utilized what we consider an extreme shift of pitch from text line to text line to further emphasize the glitch and hybrid form, or a kind of “ghost,” that is, a spectral presence that one might associate with the disembodied voices of the talking heads we describe in more detail in the Voice/Body section.

Inspiration