Whispering Water: Materializing Human-AI Dialogue as Interactive Ripples

TL;DR

Whispering Water is an interactive installation that transforms human speech into cymatic water patterns, creating a physical dialogue medium that explores emotional expression and AI-human interaction through water ripples.

Contribution

It introduces a novel algorithm translating speech into water ripples, materializing AI dialogue as physical phenomena for emotional and sensory exploration.

Findings

Water ripples reflect speech sentiment and content.

Participants engage in a multi-phase ritual of confession and response.

The system enables emotional self-exploration through physical AI-human interaction.

Abstract

Across cultures, water has served as a recipient of human confession, a yielding medium that receives vulnerability where rigid surfaces cannot. We present Whispering Water, an interactive installation that materializes human-AI dialogue through cymatic patterns on water. Participants confess secrets to a water surface, triggering a four-phase ritual: confession, contemplation, response, and release. The user's speech sentiment is directly transmitted into the water to prime its state, while semantic content enters a multi-agent system, initiating ripples of conversation where agent identities are situated through discourse and voice profiles are chosen based on what they say. We propose a novel algorithm that decomposes speech into component waves and reconstructs them in water, establishing a translation between speech and the physics of material form. By rendering machine reasoning as emergent physical phenomena, the installation explores possibilities for emotional self-exploration through ambiguous, sensory-rich interfaces.