«Máquina de Ouver» — From Sound to Type: Finding the Visual Representation of Speech by Mapping Sound Features to Typographic Variables
Authors
Abstract
Typography is considered by many authors the visual representation of language, and through writing, the human being found a way to register and share information. Throughout the history of typography, there were many authors that explored this connection between words and their sounds, trying to narrow the gap between what we say, how we hear it and how it should be read.We introduce "Máquina de Ouver", a system that analyses speech recordings and creates a visual representation for its expressiveness, using typographic variables and composition.
Our system takes advantage of the scripting capabilities of Praat, Adobe's InDesign and Adobe's After Effects software to retrieve the sound features from speech recordings and dynamically creates a typographic composition that results in a static artifact as a poster or a dynamic one, such as a video.
The majority of our experimentation process uses poetry performances as the system input since this can be one of the most dynamic and richest forms of speech in terms of expressiveness.