Sound + fonts

Dyana Weissman

Watching this I couldn't help but think of @Frank Grießhammer's Box Drawing presentation at TypeCon Portland where he presented ASCII art (or was it Box Drawing Art?) and LettError's Panchromatic Hybrid Style Selector. We have color fonts, wind fonts, and variable fonts, obviously we need sound fonts next. And taste fonts and smell fonts.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

That reminds me of the "experiments" in the 90s that translated keystrokes into sounds. There was an issue of Emigre about that sort of thing. And at least one entry into last year's protoType competition attempted it too.

Simon Cozens

Just van Rossum's Atypi2016 talk was this sort of thing, wasn't it?

https://www.atypi.org/type-typography/the-sound-of-shapes-shape-of-sounds

Dyana Weissman

I KNEW something like this was already out there. I missed this one. Thanks for sharing.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

It's been out there for a while.

James Puckett

I’d rather that variable font parameters be controlled by sound. Seems like something Andy Clymer could do in an afternoon.

Jens Kutilek

I made some experiments turning contours into waveform loops a while ago: 

Vassil Kateliev

now these are some seriously interesting experiments, but I was hoping to see (hear ) something a little bit more practical. For quite some time, I was wondering if a tool could be programmed to play-out bezier curves in such a way that G2 continuity errors could be detected, meaning an audio version of Yanone's Speed Punk (and off of it's clones) that would eliminate visual clutter while working (all those helpful, but otherwise annoying/distrracting visualizations over my contours). I believe that with little practice, such ability "to hear" the contour errors vs smoothness could be humanly possible if implemented the right way. What do you think, could we add another sense to help us out design more easily?