Visualizing Sounds

The following quote sums up something I've been kicking around in my head for the last few years, really:

"I am interested in how to give form to something that is formless. Formless things have many qualities, among them sound, movement, atmosphere, taste, light and shadow, and I am particularly interested in sound, There are many ways to interpret sound, My first step being to translate the sound [into] an onomatopoeic word. My own country of Japan has many onomatopoeic words.

Furthermore, the Japanese katakana alphabet is used to communicate foreign words by breaking them down into their constituent syllables. These translated foreign words are unique to the Japanese language.

I believe there is a universal communicative quality to sound as opposed to language. In Japanese, onomatopoeic words are often used to describe events which have no sound, thereby creating an imaginative link between language and reality. I am interested in investigating ways of communicating to as many people as possible through sound, In the visual language this would be akin to road signs, traffic signals, toilet signs, and hazard patterns. I am also interested in describing sound through visual language. For example, in Japanese manga comics a loud sound is often signified by larger, bolder letters. I am currently exploring this idea further."

YES. Hell yes. This is part of what I've been struggling with in dealing with academic disdain for graphic novels/comics, film, etc. It's also something that drives me nuts about academic English study and "writing." I wish I could find a quotation from Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book - Ewan Macgregor plays an author who meets an Asian woman of mixed heritage. She is a calligrapher, and asks his job. He answers "writer." She tells him to write something for her, and he is confused, then writes one word on a piece of paper. She becomes angry and tells him that he is no writer, and there is no beauty in his word.

This exchange is telling. I need more time and focus to articulate this more, but I'll return to it here soon. But one thing that keeps striking me so much about living in Japan and learning Japanese is the way that the language is so phonetic and yet so visual. One character can be a whole concept, but it has a specific set of pronunciations that don't really deviate. But the roman alphabet is so far removed from its pictographic origins that we don't at all associate (for example) the letter A with a bull's head anymore, and we've even abandoned characters like thorn that are at least pseudo-representative visually. One telling aspect of the differences between Japanese and English is a notion I have that we, American English speakers, tend to think in words and ideas. When we write, we're not very often transcribing sounds directly. Instead, when we speak we are rendering into sound symbols that stand for ideas. This transition happens when we become literate, obviously (if it's real) -- but think about the way you speak. How often do you say the terminal "g" in a word ending in "ng," like "ring" or "ding" or "thing." I'm not talking about if you say it now, thinking about it - I'm talking about in normal speech. We tend to say "reen" and "deen" and "theen" -- those are horrible transliterations, but since I'm not sure if I can even render the International Phonetic Alphabet online, they're gonna have to do. "Gonna" is a great example. So is "kinda" and "sorta." Those words are renderings of ways people actually pronounce things.

In Japanese, spelling changes to match pronunciation, and this is just seen (and treated) as accuracy. There are still "wrong" ways to write, say, and do things, but there's a much greater sense of proper rendering in writing "se ya na" to mean the Kansai dialect version of "sou desu ne" even though "se" is actually a corruption and quick way to say "sou." The same goes for "sugei" and "yabei" which are really just masculine informal ways to say "sugoi" and "yabai." They are rendered as pronounced, every time, even though they come from these other words. This is seen as merely informal, rather than as "wrong" or "incorrect."

It's too easy right now to get off on too many tangents. Meanwhile, I'll eventually bring this all back to subtitles on Japanese TV, the ABC show Heroes, and comic books. Oh, and literature and desktop publishing.