Month: February 2023

Jack Xu
Music: See You Again by Tyler, The Creator / Kali Uchis

The project was all about visualizing sound so I chose a song that both included dynamic rap and lyric chorus. To match the musicality of the song, I not only used coherent letter curves but also added scattered letters.

Inspired by my One Black Square design, I used similarity, proximity and closure in sound visualization project. Simiilarity reflected the chorus part that basically remained the same in the song. Proximity and closure standed for the intro, verse 1&2, chorus and outro that all played their part in the song.

Here was my first version:

The letters on the top left corner and the separated letters in the middle referred to the rap part because they represented the free flows and rhythms. Letter “J” was similar to the shape of a saxophone which also appeared in the song. Beside it, the letter “k” resembled a blade, which meant the rap part rushed in at the beginning of the song. For lettter “R” and “d”, I tried to use symmetry principle to stand for the chorus part. Also, the fading effect represented the volume of the music changed from loud to faint at the end of the chorus.

In the mid-critique, most people thought that the artwork matched the feeling and the structure of the song. However, there were parts that needed improvement: 1. The scattered letters could be more diverse because the artist used various words in rapping. 2. There were many parts but they were a little bit separated so maybe using overlapping was one solution.

Therefore, I revised based on the suggestions in the mid-critique. More overlapping effects were used in the bottom half to build connections between different parts and more letters were used in the middle part. What’s more, I added a ‘pair’ of ‘WWW’ letters in the middle to make top and bottom parts more related to each other.

If I had more time, I would still focus on how to enhance the overall sense of the work. Maybe the letter ‘K’ could be replaced by other small letters.

Jack & Rebecca

In Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, the plot centres around a linguist called Dr. Louise and her breakthrough in speaking with aliens who have travelled in the space with gigantic spacecraft. Then an idea came to our mind: if we were Dr.Louise, how would we introduce one of the human technologies to heptapods in the way they could understand? 

First of all, we need to understand the linguistic characteristics of heptapods’ mode of communication: the physical structure of heptapods’ bodies can influence how they communicate. As a result of the specific configuration of its seven limbs, a heptapod has a symmetry pattern known as heptaradial symmetry. They have limbs that feature joints that are similar to those seen on arthropods and end in points that are capable of separating to create a “hand” that has seven lobes, similar to those found on starfish. It seems as if they walk with five limbs in front of them while the remaining two are behind them. Their writings do not have a “forward” orientation since their bodies do not have a “forward” direction at all. Because of this, they are able to read a word with the same amount of ease regardless of how it is rotated. Therefore, it’s important to draw symmetrical shapes in the plaque.

Next, heptapods’ mindsets about physics knowledge also influence their perceptions. As mentioned in the text, “Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose “(Chiang, 32). This explains why they could understand physical laws that appeared difficult to humans while failing to grasp the most fundamental physical properties. Based on this peculiar phenomenon, we assume that they could understand Newton’s Three Laws of Motion.

Inspired by the great wisdom of the ancient Chinese, we decided to introduce a traditional woodworking joint that has been used for ages—mortise and tenon.

As demonstrated in the plaque, there are two pieces of wood in the middle. How to stably connect them together in a T-shape? If we look at the left part, only putting them closely to each other is useless since forces in many directions can cause them to separate. Then it’s necessary to introduce mortise and tenon. The first step is to cut out a triangular body, a flat rectangular body and a small triangular body in the middle of a piece of wood as mortise and cut excess wood at one end of the other piece of wood to fit the three shapes above. Then just put the corresponding parts together and insert the small triangular body into the slit to fix. Thanks to the Interaction forces between objects and static friction, the joint wood is very stable and durable to withstand significant weight and stress from all directions.

For heptapods, they are likely to understand our plaque because nearly all of the shapes in our plaque were symmetrical and the physical knowledge of mechanics is also within their scope of knowledge. Besides, we use arrows as a way to help understanding. What’s more, mortise and tenon can be applied to other situations such as building a space architecture or designing a spacecraft, which is crucial for heptapods to explore in the universe.

Work Cited:

1.Chiang, Ted. “Story of your life.” Stories of your life and others (1998): 117-78.

The story introduced a kind of alien called “Heptapod”. As is known to all, human’s written and spoken languages are often related in meaning or pronunciation. Usually, each graph represents a spoken word. However, this is not the case for Heptapods. Their writing constitutes a completely seperate language from their speech, and these two languages are called Heptapod B and Heptapod A respectively by the main character. One big difference between human’s writings and Heptapod’s writings is that we use consecutive recognizable letters or glyphs while Heptapods use lots of intricate graphic desgins. They write a sentence through sticking together as many logograms as needed. What’s more, in their spoken language, a noun has a case marker showing whether it’s a subject or object. Yet, in their written language, a noun’s subject or object may be determined by how its logogram is oriented in relation to the verb. In comparison, these two phenomena do not exist in human languages.

Another interesting point is that the physical structure of body can inform the way of communicating. A heptapod is heptaradially symmetrical due to its seven limbs, which are arranged in a certain way. They have limbs with joins that resemble arthropods and finish in points that may separate to form a “hand” with seven points like a starfish. They appear to walk with five limbs in front and the remaining two in back. It is likely that they have no eyes. Since their bodies don’t have a ”forward“ direction, their writings also have no “forward” direction. That’s the reason why they can read a word with equal ease no matter how it’s rotated. However, for us humans, our vision is limited by the direction in which our eyes look, and our hearing is determined by our ears. Hence, the words we write tend to have a single reading order and direction, and the words of verbal communication are linear.