Sing the Gloaming is a collaboration between Professor Simon Kirby and artist/musicians Tommy Perman and Rob St. John, taking its inspiration from Simon’s research in the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Language Evolution.
It's a project on light, language and landscape, created using experimental art and music, featuring some of Scotland’s finest vocalists: Kenny Anderson, Nerea Bello, Aidan Moffat, Emily Scott, Su Shaw, Hanna Tuulikki and Andrew Wasylyk.
Each singer was asked to find a place where light moves, then record short new vocal pieces around particular ‘light words’ there, thinking about the qualities of the space they were in, and those of the words themselves when recording their pieces.
The ‘light words’ in Sing the Gloaming are phonaesthemes, words whose form seems to evoke their meaning directly. In the English language, there are many beginning with “gl” which relate to light, for example: glimmer, glitter, glow, gleam and gloom. These words have all evolved from a single word spoke
