Here's the trailer for LAST WHISPERS, a museum installation art-piece Marco Capalbo and I wrote music and designed sound for. Conceived and directed by Lena Herzog, LAST WHISPERS is a project about the mass extinction of languages. Here's a better explanation, in Lena's words:

"Every two weeks the world loses a language. At an unprecedented speed, faster than the extinction of some species, our linguistic diversity—the very means by which we know ourselves—is eroding. Today, out of the 7,000 languages remaining on Earth, only 30 are spoken among the majority of the world population. It is estimated that at least half of the planet’s currently spoken languages will have died out by the end of this century. Some estimates project a much greater speed of disappearance.

Every community that loses its language feels as if it is the only one experiencing this. In fact, this is happening to most languages. In an attempt to raise awareness about this issue, the United Nations General Assembly and UNESCO have declared 2019 the “International Year of Indigenous Languages.

While we are drowning in the noise of our own voices, uttered within dominant cultures and languages, we are surrounded by an ocean filled with the silence of others and barely hear an echo of the vanishing chorus. We must hear it and feel its loss.

Last Whispers is an invocation of languages that have gone extinct and an incantation of those that are endangered. It is an immersive oratorio composed of their recordings."