Phonetic Bloom

A Spoken Word System for Sonic Abstraction with Live Voice and AI

What happens to language when it loses its meaning,
but keeps its shape?

Phonetic Bloom begins with a single spoken word.
A sound, familiar. Defined. Contained.
And then—
it opens.

The system listens.
It hears the word and responds—not with an answer, but with a spiral.
A trail of synonyms, echoes, near-meanings, spoken by machines, transformed by synthesis. Each one peels away from the original—slightly altered, slightly delayed—
until what remains is no longer language,
but sound.

The voice becomes texture.
Meaning stretches, melts, disperses.
What was once clear becomes resonance.
What was once speech becomes music.

Built from natural language models and real-time synthesis, Phonetic Bloom is part experiment, part meditation.
It explores how language degrades, reshapes, and returns to us through vibration—
how we still feel something, even when the words have gone.

As the performance unfolds, words blur into tones,
tones into textures,
and listeners are left not with a message,
but with a question—
not with language,
but with what lingers after it.

(Premiering at CCRMA Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics on Premiere on June 4, 2025)

Phonetic Bloom