The goal was to create an exhibition for the Gutenberg Museum on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus. In the end I realised the Open Type Face project, but in the beginning I was experimenting with type and sound.
I was fascinated by Lazlo Moholy Nagy's idea of an »Ritzschrift ABC« (Carved ABC). His idea was to carve single letters directly into a vinyl record and play it on a gramophone. The resulting sounds would be a direct transformation of typography to sound.
Magnification of a vinyl record
My question was, what is the vinyl record in 2019? During my research, I stumbled across a spectrogram. A spectrogram is a graphical representation of sound, it shows the spectrum and the individual tones and pitches of sound on a 2D surface.
Ringtone displayed on a Spectrogram
During my research I also came across the artists »Aphex Twins«. In their song »Windowlicker«, is a hidden demon face, which is only visible on a spectrogram.
So if thats possible, we could make the same with letters!
Source: http://www.bastwood.com/?page_id=10
For this I have developed a small tool that converts an image into sounds and thereby makes it visible on a spectrogram. The SAMPLE below is actually just a .wav file displayed on a spectrogram.
Simple tool to display fonts on a spectrogram
Exploring different shapes
After that I had created a HTML-Canvas on which I could display fonts, variable fonts and additionally draw with a brush.
Drawing on canvas and translating it to sound
Variable Font experiments
In addition to the font I also added a blur filter, this actually softened the image and sound. The goal of this project would have been to create a legible and good sounding font, which would have brought Laszlo Moholy Nagy's »Ritzschrift ABC« into the present. Since I decided to go with the OTF project (also available on this website), this work remained an experiment.
Blur Filter on Variable Font