Uploaded December 2016 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago
The universal dance of human speech as revealed in 20 tales from everywhere, spoken in tongues.
In memorian, Scheherezade, died in suspicious circumstances, Abu Ghraib, 2004.
In Globalalia, I wanted to use human speech, but focus on what we hold in common as human beings. Although the world’s languages contain many millions of words, these are constructed from a much smaller set of sounds, the syllables. I wrote to several friends asking them to collect voices from their local radio stations, and also recorded voices from TV stations via satellite dish, assembling sounds from 134 voices in 26 different languages. I then edited these into their syllables, ending with more than 8300 sources.
To deal with this mass of sounds, I created a database in the Sound Loom to keep track of them. The most useful features to recall were the identity of the speaker; the language used; the gender/age of the speaker; the initial consonant (group) (if any); vowel (or vowel-glide); final consonant group (if any); pitch and pitch-glide; and some other qualities (brassy, breathy, rasping, bright, and so on). Syllables with specific properties could then be quickly selected for use.
To shape the piece I adopted the convention of the frame tale, where one story (the frame) is used as a device to tell other stories, the most famous example being Scheherezade, or the Arabian Nights. Scheherezade, after a night of passion, is to be executed by her husband, the King, but each day distracts him by telling a story, thus prolonging her own life.
Globalalia begins with a short ‘frame tale’ constructed from syllables taken from many people and languages. The tale recurs (always varied) throughout the piece, binding it together, and we hear it fading into the distance at the very end.
The universal dance of human speech as revealed in 20 tales from everywhere, spoken in tongues.
In memorian, Scheherezade, died in suspicious circumstances, Abu Ghraib, 2004.
In Globalalia, I wanted to use human speech, but focus on what we hold in common as human beings. Although the world’s languages contain many millions of words, these are constructed from a much smaller set of sounds, the syllables. I wrote to several friends asking them to collect voices from their local radio stations, and also recorded voices from TV stations via satellite dish, assembling sounds from 134 voices in 26 different languages. I then edited these into their syllables, ending with more than 8300 sources.
To deal with this mass of sounds, I created a database in the Sound Loom to keep track of them. The most useful features to recall were the identity of the speaker; the language used; the gender/age of the speaker; the initial consonant (group) (if any); vowel (or vowel-glide); final consonant group (if any); pitch and pitch-glide; and some other qualities (brassy, breathy, rasping, bright, and so on). Syllables with specific properties could then be quickly selected for use.
To shape the piece I adopted the convention of the frame tale, where one story (the frame) is used as a device to tell other stories, the most famous example being Scheherezade, or the Arabian Nights. Scheherezade, after a night of passion, is to be executed by her husband, the King, but each day distracts him by telling a story, thus prolonging her own life.
Globalalia begins with a short ‘frame tale’ constructed from syllables taken from many people and languages. The tale recurs (always varied) throughout the piece, binding it together, and we hear it fading into the distance at the very end.
