ROANOKE, VA.- The Art Museum continues its dedication to new media art with the installation of Messa di Voce on February 13. Messa di Voce, which literally translates to “placing the voice”, enables public play and exploration through the fiction that the voice can be seen. Artists and engineers Zachary Lieberman and Golan Levin, working together with international vocalists-composers Jaap Blonk and Joan La Barbara, have created an extraordinary new media artwork that melds the latest in computer vision with cutting-edge speech analysis.

Up to two visitors at a time can create visual art with their own voices and movements, including exclamations, sounds, giggles, and songs. In addition to the interactive installation, visitors can watch performance footage of Blonk and La Barbara, whose shouts, speech and songs are transformed into compelling and expressive graphics that paint a visual picture of the human voice. The performance is divided into 12 audiovisual vignettes, which create a narrative progression from pure sound, to speech, to song.

“Messa di Voce exemplifies the Art Museum’s dedication to exhibiting ground-breaking works of new media art,” said Ed Murphy, president of the Art Museum’s Board of Trustees. “The sophisticated technology used in the piece to create an artwork that is unique for each performance is truly amazing. I hope that the public will take advantage of the opportunity to explore the phenomenal visual component of their voice.”

Lieberman and Levin work at the cutting edge of digital art. For Messa di Voce, Lieberman and Levin created interactive visualization software that transforms participants’ voices into visual form using real-time computer processing. These images can then be manipulated by participants using their body movements and gestures, creating an immersive environment of sound and motion. The piece works on multiple levels so that it is both child friendly and capable of very sophisticated effects and includes multiple modules that the user can choose to change the appearance and nature of the interaction.

“As a piece that is playful and inventive and at the same time artistically and technically sophisticated, Messa di Voce is the ideal work to further the Art Museum’s program of new media installations,” said Susannah Koerber, the Art Museum’s chief curator.

Levin has been producing internationally acclaimed works since 2000 and has been described as one of the “Top 100 Innovators Under 35” by Technology Review and “one of the most brilliant figures in contemporary audiovisual art” by the Spanish newspaper El Pais. He currently serves as Assistant Professor of Electronic Time-Based Art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Messa di Voce also is currently installed at the Ars Electronica Center (AEC) in Linz, Austria and the Center for Media and Art (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, the two foremost museums for new media art.

Messa di Voce and Levin’s lecture are sponsored by the Richard Gwathmey and Caroline T. Gwathmey Memorial Trust, the City of Roanoke, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.