I have been exploring the sound of language. I used the idea of “gibberish” to facilitate my message that there is so much more to listen to within language besides the meaning of the words. In this project I defined gibberish as mimicking language without mimicking a specific language thinking much about the sounds that are coming out of your mouth.

 

Growing up bilingual in a multilingual environment I was exposed to a lot of different sounds and nuances in speech. Speaking gibberish with my sister was just a fun game we played to pretend we spoke more languages. It was a performance of conversation and never really evolved into an encoded language. When I played this same game with my friends, I noticed that we were all speaking gibberish differently. Our native tongues were different, and we grew up in different countries. That made me curious about how gibberish sounds among different people.

 

What does a “foreign language” sound like to different individuals, and how does our backgrounds affect how we speak. I recorded my friends telling stories and having conversations with me in gibberish, then I explored how the performance of conversation is extended in music. Once we let go of the meaning of words, language becomes, sounds with pitch, tone, and rhythm.