Artist Entry~ Sveriges Radio

I stumbled upon this piece of new media art through BetaSpace, a new media art source. The Title of the piece is Let Them Sing It For You. Basically it is a program in which you can type in any words of your choice. They can be a famous quote, your own words, or a sentence (or several). Once typing in your words you press the play button. Then, from a data base of songs, the program will "play your words". Essentially it is a database full of words taken from songs. So, for instance, one might put in the word "never" and the database will play "never" from some song that they took that word from. I tried out this program. From the website there was little to no information about the program so i had no idea what the program was going to be. I was wondering who "they" were. I entered the words, "How is this art? Can you tell me please? Is it because you use appropriation? Good luck finding that word in your database." And sure enough the program played my words through a bunch of words from songs...but, of course, appropriation was not found. The program used a series of words that, when placed together, sort of sounded like appropriation. There really isn't any writing on this piece of art so i'll make my own assessment. I think this piece of new media art is amusing at best. The most apparent thing to me is that it definitely uses appropriation. I think one thing that is interesting about this is that music is a huge part of culture, especially popular music, which is where most of the words come from. Another interesting thing is that even though each word has its own melodic sound the final piece that is played doesn't sound like music. It is disjointed and maybe even unsettling to listen to. I think this piece could be highlighting how music is created and how one cannot simply string together what makes up a library of popular music and create a new song.