German Historical Museum Berlin
14.01.2009 - 03.05.2009

The composition is made up solely of phonetic material taken from speech recordings from various multimedia projects carried out in the Department of Historical Linguistics at the Humboldt University in Berlin. The phonetic collages composed of this material and that emit bursts sound throughout the gateway focus on various dimensions of natural language:

• The internal structure of speech: elements of speech with different level of complexity can be heard (single sounds, syllables, words, phrases and sentences)

• The historical dimension of language: the collages contain linguistic snippets of German as it was spoken throughout the ages (Old High German, Middle High German, Early New High German, New High German)

• The synchronic diversity of language: various regional versions of contemporary German can be heard along with speech material from around the world