I was wondering about the relative frequency of certain topics that intrigue me in regard to contemporary, technology-oriented sound studies. For a quick glimpse, first I charted “machine listening” in Google Trends, then adding “audio surveillance” and, for a broader swath, “audio deepfake.” The three terms were almost identical in the narrow band of popularity they populated for the past few years. I sought to expand the subject matter with a fourth item, something related to artificial intelligence.
Needless to say, we’re in the midst of AI Summer. These days “AI + [anything]” — following the rise in chatter around DALL-E 2, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, DeepMind, Bard, and OpenAI, among other projects — is going to be more popular now than it was even six or seven months ago.
Still, when I selected a term, I was fascinated to see how much larger this one line item was than the others. To round out the set, I added what I imagined would be the more active “voice ai,” yielding the outlier green bar in the chart below. The results marked a significant shift:
What’s going on isn’t merely that “voice AI” is greater than the other three lines combined. It’s that “voice AI” renders any internal divergence among those three to a flattened data nothing-burger. To a degree, this divide might signal that a single term has become a catchall for all manner of subjects, fields, and anxieties in the popular imagination. Alternately, it could also mean that whatever energy might be spent more in more different ways is now focused, laser tight, on where the SEO money is. What would be great would be to see a wider variety of terms gain traction as time passes.
What other key terms interest you in this realm?