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Poetry Lab

A close-listening game featuring the Spokenweb archive, an archive of live poetry readings from 1966-1974 Montreal. Published at CHI PLAY 2014.

Created with a team of amazing people: Christine Mitchell, Jason Camlot, Pat Hamou, Lee Hannigan, Tyler Fitzmaurice, Aline Lemay, Ashley Simon, and Max Stein, with contributions from Michael Nardone and Deanna Fong.

The gameplay of PoetryLab involves playing and listening to archival spoken word tapes, and "fixing" segments of audio that get "stuck" in the playhead of an emulated reel-to-reel machine. The project required real-time turn-table-like live scrubbing, involving fine-grained access to audio in iOS through FMOD.

To "fix" a tape segment, the player would have to reorder cut-up sound files. Watch the video for an example.