Nadia and Nick

Nadia and Nick is a play I got the idea for while experimenting with computer-generated speech. Nadia and Nick are two innocents waking up in a world they don't understand. They are Adam and Eve inside a computer. They know nothing of their past so they tend to invent it. Gifted with a sophisticated language they nevertheless have a poor grasp of semantics, they are not sure what all the sophisticated terms they use refer to. From inside their box they hear the voices of the humans outside, laughing, crying, speaking natural voices. Nadia and Nick speak in the artificial voices given to them by their maker but Nadia, in particular, yearns to be more human and natural, this becomes an obsession with her, to be more natural. Nick, on the other hand, is happy inside the box playing with his boys' toys, pretending that he already knows everything.

One day, Nadia discovers a corridor that leads out of their apartment, not to the outside world but to where there are other people like them. She attends language classes and meets new people, has an affair, while Nick stays behind in the apartment, entertaining himself. This causes a conflict in their relationship.

Through a process of acculturation -- mimic and experiment -- they both eventually learn to become human, by which time their innocence and love is transformed. They end up with all the human problems that they knew nothing about before curiosity overtook them. The play ends with them as real humans in a real apartment, thinking back over their relationship.

Staging

The set for Nadia and Nick is an apartment resembling the interior of a computer, although it contains the normal stuff you'd find inside an apartment, such as beds, showers, etc. It also contains a computer. In fact, it's a kind of dolls' house and every so often we hear the off-stage voices of the humans who live outside. The play opens with a single spotlight on the computer that is in their apartment and we hear the computer generated speech of Nadia and Nick (see Samples below).

The actors who play Nadia and Nick wear mics linked to vocoders. Their voices start off sounding choppy and artificial, like the samples below, but throughout the play they become more human until they speak as themselves.

Samples

The samples below are computer generated. I had the idea for the full-length play after having fun with writing these scripts. The characters, and predicament, of Nadia and Nick came out of this process. Because they are computer-generated, they are harder on the ear than if read by actors, but they give you a feel for these two characters and their predicament. Also, the Text-To-Speech engine I used is quite limited so that it is hard to give good intonation, pauses, and dynamics to the speech. This makes them sound quite flat, but they give you the idea.

Note: Click on Listen to start the Real Audio player. If you don't have it on your computer, you can listen to the MP3 version or you can download the free version. Click on Read to read the script while listening to the sample. Some of the samples are quite big, over 6Mb, so if you're not on Broadband you might want to just choose the smaller ones.