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“Bicycle Built For 2,000” is a collaborative sound recording project by Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey, made-up of 2088 individual voice recordings from 71 countries around the world. The project employed the use of Amazons “Mechanical Turk” web service, which allowed people to contribute online, first listening to a short sound clip then imitating and recording what they have heard.

Each recording was made within a web browser using a custom audio tool built using Processing, an open source Java based framework. The participants were not given any additional information about the project itself and paid a grand total of $0.06 US dollars for each recording.

What emerges is a collective recording of voices, haunting and ethereal in nature. The multitude of different voices combine to create the song “Daisy Bell” written by Harry Dacre in 1892, and made famous in 1962 as the first example of speech synthesis. Its place within Bicyce Built for 2000 is in contrast to this with the song made up of a “distributed system of human voices from all over the world”.

More information on this project can be found at their website at:
http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/