The Tower of Babel, a myth in the Bible, is known as an icon of the world if diversity that implies that human being should not try to question religion. However, this work is another attempt to break the border of languages and mu- sic to explore the possibility of making music from voices.
The Tower of Babel is a story about people on the earth
helping each other to build a tall tower to reach God. God gets scared, so he makes people speak different languages, so they can- not communicate and cannot finish their job. The sound art piece focuses the process of
blending people different lan- guages to create a music concrete. Therefore, the process of making the piece is as important as the piece itself. This pice can be called the first demo version be- cause I picked just four languages to compose a three minute piece while with unlimited length and time I can develop this project to many languages that can strengthen the concept of the pice more.
Switching Languages
I looked for each language version to let each announce read the declaration of human rights in his or her mother tongue. Fur- thermore, I used not only tradi- tional reading but also asked the readers to switch their language. They had to teach each other to read a new language in a short time. They used many techniques such as English phonetic and drawing to communicate the cor- rect way to read. As a result, al- though not everyone can pro- nounce others’ language correctly, they simulated a ‘Tower of Babel’ event when people just lost an ability to communicate and all the languages became non- understandable. Moreover, the audience will feel the same thing because the piece starts off like it is using common language, but later a Korean voice starts to speak English, Chinese speaks Korean and so on. Thus the audi- ence will try to understand be- cause there is still English pop-up time to time.
The sound piece simulate a metaphor of the ‘Tower Babel’ event where people lost commu- nication again.
The declaration of human rights
For the reading material, I chose the declaration of human rights. The declaration of human rights is a great heritage of hu- man being that shows how people try to manage to live together in diversity peacefully. In other word, the declaration of human rights is a modern signifier of The
Tower of Babel that unites people to together, again.
