Flagship, in development since 2025
PERI
A real time neural vocal instrument, trained on the voice of the artist's late father, Diepiri MacPepple-Jaja, an oil painter and documentary filmmaker who filmed the African diaspora across docu-feature work, and who surveyed land for a living.
The artefact that survives the artist.
The work
PERI is built on RAVE, a real time autoencoder for raw audio. The model learns the timbral and gestural vocabulary of a voice corpus and can be played live, in Max/MSP, through nn~. When the performer sings into PERI, the instrument responds with material learned from the corpus. The living voice navigates the carried one.
The deceased is material in the work, never a simulated agent. PERI is a duet, not a chatbot. The performer is always the player.
The lineage
Diepiri surveyed land, painted in oil, and filmed the African diaspora. His film work moved between documentary and docu-feature, taking the diaspora as both subject and audience. Three crafts. One life. PERI carries one part of it in audio. Companion models, trained on his paintings and his films, will carry the others.
Surveying is the rationalist ancestor of photogrammetry, NeRF, and Gaussian Splatting. Painting and film are its siblings. All three sit inside an older family of pattern-coding practices: ifa, sikidy, lusona, khatt al-raml, veve. Earth read as pattern, encoded as figure, transmitted across generations.
PERI is a son continuing a father's project into the mediums that succeeded it.
The corpus
Two hours and fifty one minutes of processed audio, all Diepiri, sourced from interviews, cooking videos, museum tours, documentaries, and ninety WhatsApp voice messages spanning 2019 to 2025. Every clip diarized, cleaned, and consent recorded.
- Duration
- 2h 51m
- Sources
- 12
- Voice messages
- 90
- Span
- 2019–25
Listen
PERI training checkpoint
Raw output, 2025
Live inference in Max/MSP through nn~. Parameter surface for blend presets, envelope, swirl rate, and wet gate threshold.
Who PERI is for
The methodology behind PERI applies wherever a voice or likeness sits inside an archive that someone is trying to honour. Four buyer types, four sets of concerns I have built the work around.
Estate executors and trustees
Posthumous consent, dignity, control over likeness, and a model that can be retired.
Cultural institutions with vocal archives
Preservation, scholarly access, documented provenance, and ethical reuse policy.
Families with intimate recordings
Presence without ventriloquism. A duet, not a chatbot. Grief held by the work, not performed by it.
Labels with historical material
IP clarity, commercial viability, and artistic integrity that survives the deal memo.
PERI is the methodology, not the product. The same approach, adapted to your archive or estate, is available as a commissioned engagement.