I'm a linguistics grad student at McGill University.
“Dialogues” is a phonetics-inspired piece by designer Steve Haslip that is featured in the book, The Triumph of the Commons: 55 Theses on the Future. The collection explores traditional concepts of dystopia, and what it means to imagine the future through art.
Hopefully the next version of this will be pictures of vocal cords, because those look very cool.
WTPh? (What the Phonics) is an interactive installation set in the touristic areas of Copenhagen. Street names in Denmark are close to impossible for foreigners to pronounce, so we did a little intervention :-)
We recorded a Danish person speaking the street names then split up each syllable. In true karaoke style, we placed lights above the matching syllable so that in real-time, you can see which part of the word is being spoken. When participants lift the speaker off the wall, it starts playing. We used Max/MSP and Arduino to build the installation.
This looks cool and also pretty effective. And potentially useful for vision-impaired people, in addition to tourists. I wonder if one could use signs like this for learning language more generally, like vocabulary items around a classroom or something.
