The Chatterbox Project

Sound recording, editing and installation for The Chatterbox Project by Elsa James and Sarah Buckle in 2013.

The Chatterbox Project was created working collaboratively with the pupils from Milton Hall; one of Southend’s most culturally diverse primary schools. The project brought a public awareness to the school’s thirty-eightspoken mother tongue languages by producing a large-scale sound installation to showcase at Metal’s 2013 Village Green Festival.

The festival was attended by over 20,000 visitors. Selected pupils participated in creative workshops at the school before recording individual ‘sound bites’ in their mother tongue language which related to their favourite things about Southend.

Full list of languages spoken: Czech, Bengali, Wolof, Latvian, Dutch, Swahili, Gaelic, Tamil, Iranian (Farsi), French, Cambodian, Polish, Punjabi, Portuguese, Gujarati, Yoruba, Igbo, Urdu, Shona, Kurdish, Cantonese, Somali, Italian, Hindi, Tagalog, Roma, Arabic, Greek, Albanian, Twi (Akan), Ghanaian, Malayalam, Mandarin, Nepali, Kamampangan, Thai, Chechen, Lithuanian.