Sunday, July 31, 2011

New release: LR's "The Devil is a Captcha"

Captcha's were already annoying, and lately they've gotten worse. The jumbled letters are so masked on website that they can be barely read, let alone retyped.

On a recent account signup, Google asked me to type something illegible. So I hit the "play" button so I could understand it. What I heard was even more disturbing (google "captcha" on youtube, others have discovered it too).

A mix of backwards and garbled voices with an anonymous robot reads random words at disjointed intervals. It sounds like digital ghosts have attacked your computer, much like those awful Hollywood EVP movies.

I was startled at first, then intriqued. What were the backwards voices saying? Not to mention the dadaist minimalist poetry that the robot spurted out.

So I downloaded the handy-dandy mp3 provided and make a collage of voices - the left channel features the forward robot with backward voices, and the right channel is backwards robot, with forward voices (which sound like they come from TV interviews)... for eleven minutes and 6 seconds (666 seconds).

Download it at the Free Music Archive or from the widget below.

BOAT!