Forgotten Voices

Barbary Grant is a highly renowned vocalist and harper within Celtic communities. She sings- and articulates fluently- in all three Goidelic languages: Scots Gaelic, Irish, and Manx. This homage won her first place in the sean nós competition at the 1998 Great American Irish Fair. (Sean nós – “old style” in Irish – is a highly ornamented style of a cappella singing.)

The library is constructed from over a thousand different vocal phrases covering over 15 hours of recording material. The phrases are divided into a variety of categories varying from some of the oldest songs known to man from the ancient Sanskrit chants to free improvisational phrases. The library has specific patches such as Balkan, Lullaby, Sanskrit Chants, Witch Chants and so forth. In addition some phrases in the library were recorded 2-3 times, which allows for a more broad type of vocal sound by layering the same phrase two or three times.

In Forgotten Voices, Ali Abdullatif Ahmida employs archival research, oral interviews and comparative analysis to rethink the history of colonial and nationalist categories and analyses of modern Libya.