▶ Project page with paper, source code, and more audio examples.

▶ Exhibited at Sommer Rundgang, UdK Medienhaus, Berlin, July 18-20, 2025.

▶ Exhibited at UdK AI Day, UdK Medienhaus, Berlin, November 14th, 2025.

Selected working methods and software

▶ deep learning, neural text-to-speech synthesis, speech emotion recognition, video editing

▶ Python, DaVinci Resolve

With the rise of fitness and entrepreneurship in Western subcultures, video clips of so-called motivational speech have received millions of views across social media. Usually, those audio­visual artifacts show excerpts from influential male figures narrating in­struc­tions for success. Addressed pri­ma­rily at men, success is often tied to wealth, professional growth, or appeal to women, while the same is obstructed by charac­teris­tics such as weakness, fragility, or discontinuity. With motivational speech, a listener’s ultimate goal is to shape a mindset, which ensures that they are on the right path toward achievement.

Through exposure and exaggeration of the absurdity of motivational speech, Motivational Speech Synthesis acts as a critical mirror of societies and subcultures fueling self-ex­ploi­tation, constant pro­duc­tivity, competition, and toxic forms of masculinity. In pursuit of so-called work-life success, this promise appears ulti­mately illusory. The deconstruction is achieved through a subversive video embedded within a mixed-media in­stalla­tion, conveying the visual and auditory language of motivational speech videos. The video, which increasingly re­veals a fact-based counter-perspective, is nar­rat­ed by an artificial voice generated by a custom-trained text-to-moti­vational-speech model. Emerging from the correlation between generalization and anticipated forward movement found in both motivational speech and machine learning techniques, the model includes an adjustable motivational factor. This sym­bolic factor scales the motivational pro­sody of the resulting voices, while its current value is shown on a scale below the subtitles. Representing the promise of social mobility found within motivational speech subcultures, this motivational factor aligns with attitudes such as “The harder you work, the more you can get,” falsely suggesting a direct correlation between social mobility and relentless commitment, effort, and quantity of work. In this view, critical factors for social mobility are not individual hard work paired with continuity and dominance but rather family background, class, and access, as empirical research confirms. By ques­tion­ing the idea of a universal road to success defined only by individual strength and the right mindset, Motivational Speech Syn­thesis addresses contemporary work ethics and how we approach goals and challenges in life.