---

What happens when we can see the sounds of our speech? Is it possible to experience a shift in feeling when speaking the prosodies of other languages? People have an innate visual sense of their language sounds. Mother Tongue mines our visual sense of language to explore our potential to inhabit different cultural and subjective sensibilities through vocalization of different language sounds as prompted by an interactive spectrograph. Participants voiced sounds from 4 language samples, Frisian, Mandarin, Canadian and British English. Using qualitative analysis to understand the experience of interacting with the spectrograph this paper charts a course for understanding participant affect in an interactive installation. The question that prompted the creation of the interactive work is whether people experience a shift in feeling when producing the sounds of another language

---

Elizabeth is a media artist with an international exhibition history creating both early digital video work and interactive installations using voice. Elizabeth currently resides in Vancouver, Canada

---