In 1993, Apple released the Newton MessagePad, the first so-called "Personal Digital Assistant". A kind of forerunner to today's smart phones, the device worked as a kind of digital notepad, allowing free form entry of both text and drawing mixed together on the same virtual page. The user wrote with a plastic pen- like stylus, the movements digitized and converted into "electronic ink" and each note stamped with a date and time. The devices handwriting recognition converted the user's writing into text on-the-fly, a famously buggy process that became (to Apple's chagrin) synonymous with the product. However, with some practice and patience, the device was said to "learn" from its user, and (more effectively) a compliant user could adapt his or her own writing to the device. Erkki was a natural for this kind of digital symbiosis and gave himself over fully to the machine.
Audio grep is the result of searching Erkki's Newton diary entries for phrases containing a particular term, and reading them with a text to speech algorithm.
Maybe the right approach to Erkki's archive, it's chance. P.Ratsas
The corpus of Erkki's cassettes has been divided in small units by different scripts and rearranged to form fragments. A script has divided the cassettes in random fragments of a length between 1 and 10 minutes. Another one associates the individual seconds according different rules of permutation. The fragments are heterogeneous assemblages of samples from different files that provoke chance associations and give a sense of the variety and richness of the audio material.