Brian Cox, actor, on language development!

Brian Cox teaches 30-month-old Theo a bit of Shakespeare. (first seen at boingboing)


Added on Feb 11:

I did not have time add comments to this clip when I originally posted it as one of my occasional offerings on creativity, language and memory development.

Theo is a remarkable, natural talker, but I can guarantee you, without ever having met his parents, that he is also benefiting from an environment in which adults speak to him all the time. I'll bet they don't use baby talk, and that they listen to him carefully, and patiently encourage him him to try again when he is not being understood. They don't finish his sentences for him. I'll also bet that there is lots of rhyming word play, nursery rhymes, and songs with gestures. And books.

Babies need to be spoken to from birth. If you watch carefully, you may occasionally have the feeling that even a very young infant is making fleeting attempts to imitate your gestures. You are not imagining this: it is the precursor of speech. By 6 months, it becomes obvious to the adults in a baby's life that babies are very social little critters. They love to imitate hand gestures, facial expressions, and the melodic contours of the language they hear. Older toddlers get joy (and social props) from imitating, as can clearly be seen in Theo's case.

Children do develop at different rates, of course, but they are often smarter and more creative than we realize...we just don't always know what they are trying to express, and sometimes we don't have the patience to truly observe.

If you have a little one in your life, please don't think that Theo's performance is a typical benchmark! I posted the clip because it is inspiring to see a little one and an adult so thoroughly engaged with each other, and mutually enjoying a brief dose of an activity a bit more creatively challenging than "Barney" or "Doodlebops".

If you do have worries that your child is lagging in language development, here is a useful developmental chart.

Nobuo Kubota Accepts Governor General's Award

Please note: the following video is NOT Nobuo Kubota's GG acceptance speech (but wouldn't that have been fun!).




The above is a clip from Kubota's sound poetry performance at Proposta 2001 in Barcelona.

Kubota was born in 1932 in Vancouver, and came to Toronto as a young man to study architecture at U of T. He practiced architecture for 10 years before turning his attention to sculpture in the early 70s. Most of his sculptural works have been installations which focus implicitly or explicitly on sound and language.

Kubota played saxophone as a member of the Artists Jazz Band, but ultimately had to abandon the instrument when he developed a painful auditory sensitivity. He later joined the CCMC (Canadian Creative Music Collective, formed in 1975 by Michael Snow and featuring a revolving group of artist/musicians over the years). As a performer, Kubota uses a range of extended vocal techniques which explore the boundaries of the human voice. Influenced by Kabuki and Noh theatrical traditions, his facial expressions are deliberate, exaggerated, and made all the more humourous by the maintenence of a neutral, deadpan deportment in the interstitial silences of his performance.

Kubota describes himself as an practitioner of Intermedia: the movement of an idea from one form (e.g., sound) and continuing into another form (e.g., sculpture).
Here is a clip of work created in collaboration with fellow Intermedia artist and poet Mark Sutherland. The oval voiceprint of Kubota's vocals is a real-time spectrogram: no manipulation or animation is involved. (see the post re: June Callwood Park for a fascinating use of the voiceprint in landscape architecture).



I Believe in Kindness: June Callwood Park

(Readers outside Canada may not know the work of activist and journalist June Callwood. Please click here to read about this gracious, generous and inspiring woman.)

A new park in Toronto to honour the memory of June Callwood is scheduled for completion in 2011. Before she died in 2007, Callwood knew that such a memorial was in the works, and she requested that the park be made with young children in mind. She loved babies: "I think that they're so perfect… They're just full of God, if God is your goodness and your decency and your capacity for affection." She believed in children: "Most people will do anything to help a child and that's the way the human race is meant to be. We're meant to be a tribe. And when it works, it just makes your heart leap." She was spiritual but not religious: "I am missing a formal religion, but I am not without a theology, and my theology is that kindness is a divinity in motion."

The international design competition for the park was awarded to the architecture and landscape design firm "gh3". The the result is a proposal so beautifully, brilliantly appropriate that it moved me to tears. Partners Pat Hansen and Diana Gerrard give credit to architecture student Joel Di Giacomo (remember that name!) for the idea which became the conceptual key to the design.

"The design starts with a simple desire: to physically embody June Callwood's voice in an intensified urban forest."

To achieve this, a digital voiceprint was made from a vocal sample taken from the last interview Ms. Callwood granted before her death. Responding to a question about her religious beliefs, Ms. Callwood said, "I believe in kindness."

This voiceprint provided the "map" for the park, which will be situated on a narrow and neglected greensward adjacent to old Fort York. The voiceprint itself will be physically rendered in granite strips, and the spaces between intensely planted with trees. The park is divided into 6 evocative zones, each engaging different aspects of a child's sense of play: imagination, contemplation, movement and exploration.


The elements include a Puddle Plaza , a bright pink rubber Puzzle Garden, a shiny, curvy stainless steel Maze, a Pink Field (also of rubber), Tree Strip Gardens, and Ephemeral Pools.

The Puzzle Plaza, perfect for climbing, jumping and balancing.

The Maze, and the granite strips which record the voiceprint.

The Pink Field.

Park benches will be translucent and contain LEDs with motion detectors, lighting up when someone sits down, and glowing at night.


The Ephemeral Pools will have a geo-thermal heating system to create a low-lying fairyland mist in winter, and providing an above-freezing micro-climate.

Absolute perfection.

(related post: Play is Child's Work)