Performers & composers

Erik Bünger

Erik Bünger is an artist, composer, musician and writer born in Växjö, Sweden in 1976 and living in Berlin. He has an MFA in Electroacoustic Composition from the Royal University College of Music in Stockholm. He works with recontextualising and remixing media, appropriated from already existing music and film in performances, installations and web projects. His work has been exhibited and performed all over the world.

Let them sing it for you

Premiered 2003.
Through pop lyrics you learn to identify your own personal feelings of love, loneliness and joy with those of famous stars. Behind these public feelings there are often the desires of commercial powers such as record and film companies. Through "Let them sing it for you", you get the possibility of doing it the other way around. Instead of letting your vocabulary of feelings be dictated by famous voices, let the famous voices express your innermost thoughts.

By typing in a text of any kind you can get it sung for you by some of the world's greatest pop stars. A database of sung words has been built up and is growing continuously through the users' own interaction. If you find a word missing in the sound vocabulary, you have the ability to suggest a song from which to take the word and send your suggestion to The Swedish Radio.

”Let them sing it for you" constitutes an alternative to the way you can get computers to sing or read a written text. Even this function is automated, but with a much richer and more unpredictable result. Send your friend or enemy a love declaration, Christmas wish or death threat sung by Judy Garland, Lou Reed and Christina Aguilera. Authorities can replace their streamlined phone answering voices with an unruly mix of mythological and sexually inviting voices belonging to the pop world's greatest icons.

The project was created for the Internet art platform SRc of the Swedish Radio. So far it has had over four million users all over the world. It received 'The Content Fusion Award' at Europrix Top Talent Award 2004 in Vienna and 'A Special Commendation' at Prix Europa 2004 in Berlin. In 2004 the Swedish version 'Låt dem sjunga det åt dig' was created in collaboration with the Swedish pop music chart Svensktoppen. It was nominated to "Stora Radiopriset: Renewer of the year" in 2005.

www.sr.se/sing