It looks like a room from the film ‘The Commitments’ but in it Fiona Shaw talks about and performs T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. As she performs the poem, you can follow the text which is highlighted in sync with the audio. Clicking on lines will earn you a repeat hearing/viewing, or you can navigate to other parts of the poem

It’s a wonderful demonstration of the possibilities of interaction between sound text and moving image.

But this is not all. You can hear other (but audio) versions of reading of the poem: two by T.S. Eliot himself, one by Viggo Mortensen, one by Alec Guinness, and another by Ted Hughes. Nimble finger work can get you versions of all of them in quick succession of the same line.

Also accompanied by videos of commentary by Seamus (‘the Famous’) Heaney, scholars, authors, and a young person with a tattoo - Frank Turner (er who?).

Fantastic first (as far as I am aware) serious scholarly entertaining app for the iPad. Congratulations to all at Faber and Faber and at Touch Press.

Outfit7.com’s Talking Tom Cat 2

I am investigating the possibilities of Apple’s iPad, to find out the kinds of activities and functionality that are available in the increasingly wide field of applications. (Er, yes, I admit it: this involves play and enjoyment and laughter). This is all with a view to producing a second edition of Streaming Speech: Listening and Pronunciation for Advanced Learners of English as an iPad app.

A free application that I really have enjoyed is Outfit7’s Talking Tom Cat 2. Which imitates anything you say to him. You can record and mail a video of the cat’s performance. As easy as pie. So it should be easy (naive little me thinks) to build in a function whereby a student can do a pronunciation performance of some kind, and post it to a teacher, or a friend, for evaluation.