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For my Memory Soundscape project, I want it to be my memory about me and the musical instruments I have learned to play. It is not something instant or for a short period of time, but rather a memory consisting of several fragments across years. If I’m not allowed for long-period memory, I would try to think of something else.

My memory with musical instruments started from learning the piano when I was in the second year of kindergarten. I learned the basics of piano notes from the book series called Thompson something (I will check that later.) It was a small room separate from my classroom. When the other kids went napping after lunch, I would go to that room to learn piano after my teacher. Then I went to primary school, the final “project” I learned was Dream Wedding and Childhood Memories by Richard Clayderman. Since then, I haven’t learned the piano after a teacher because I went to a boarding junior high school, and I started to learn the saxophone, the guzheng, the flute, and the suona. When I was learning them, my brother have started learning the piano as well, and the violin and the drums.

I would like to record the sounds of those instruments that my family constantly hear at our house, both the not so good sounds when we first learned them and the better sounds after we learned entire pieces of songs. I also want to include the struggles and happiness, or certain occasions like performances, we have gone through in our learning processes.

Developed based on my Diptych Concept, I went with Uno for the unedited image, but I modified the layout of the cards a bit. I left only one wild card among the rest that are red, yellow, green, and blue cards, trying to emphasize its uniqueness.

For the other image, I took pictures of several modern buildings at the New Bund and the Bund areas. I removed their backgrounds and applied image adjustments in Photoshop, including changes of hue/saturation, color balance, threshold, gradient map, etc. I tried to shoot buildings that have regular geometric shapes and rotate them to resonate with the Uno cards. I also made them black-and-white to contrast with the first image. The only saturated building is a temple in Hangzhou, called Faxi Temple.

In general, I would like to compare and contrast geometric shapes, colorfulness and monochromaticity, and organized and random. In the first image, I especially want to emphasize the wild card. In a world full of colors, and various human beings (?), it is easy to be overwhelmed. However, I think one (not only human but also could be another form of life) always possess something unique, or taking the literal meaning of “wild”, some “crazy” thoughts/abilities/potentials that even themselves have not realized.

Similarly, in the second image, I would like to create a scene filled with modernization and fast-paced metropolitan feeling. The rotated buildings add more unsteadiness to this city life. Sometimes, it almost feel like a cliche for a human being to go to urban areas, work, and develop. However, I always think other things that bear more of nature, serenity, human spirits, such as temples, provides a different kind of atmosphere.

I’m thinking to make a Uno & Nature Series Pokers. Inspired from the Jack, Queen, and King in pokers, I want to take some pictures of these cards without editing. On the other hand, I want to take pictures of the three dogs of my family, Baba, Fefe, and Huhu, and photoshop them on the places of J, Q, and K, so that I would get a set of poker from A to 10 plus B, F, and H, instead of J, Q, and K.

I was going to take the pictures of pokers, but I decide that Uno has more “classic” colors, so I took some Uno pictures instead. Although I really wanted to include my pets into the cards, I found it difficult to let them stay still and took decent pictures, so I may try something else instead. For the possible set of Nature Series Pokers, I want to utilize frames and fonts inspired from the fragrance brand Diptyque.

As for composition, I want the cards to appear random in both of these images, such as overlapping with other cards. I want to emphasize the geometric shapes and distinctive colors of the cards.

As an alternative of my pets, I may consider collaging the pictures of spring flowers with similar composition of the Uno ones, but not making them into cards.

In addition, I’m considering pictures of architecture, such as skyscrappers and temples, as something organized and geometric, and Lego models, as something colorful and random, but I haven’t gone into details, especially the photoshopped parts.

In general, I would like to compare/contrast the conceptions of man-made vs natural, personal connections to these objects/pets, colorful vs monotonic, organized & geometric & random.

Here is my notes in Kami again.

(p11) Early development of photography and computer

• daguerreotype seemed more influential to photography than computers as heavily text-based (The daguerreotype银版照相 was the first commercially successful photographic process (1839-1860) in the history of photography. Named after the inventor, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, each daguerreotype is a unique image on a silvered copper plate.)
• computers digitalize photography (restructured into pixels and became easily manipulated/transmitted)
• photography losing objectivity while being manipulated (fidelity replaced by “fluidity of the digital”)

(p12) Implications of new technologies

• e.g. automobile
• possible revolutionary influence of digital photography, e.g. photography from painting
• e.g. reliability of documentation and familiarity with genetic modification, “increasingly omnipresent surveillance, synthetic movies without live actors, a disbelief in the news”

(p12) “If there was one to what “reality” would it refer?”

• interesting how photography was designed to record “reality” and then it could be manipulated
• “reality” seems to become fuzzy since the universality of the internet in general

(p13) Examples of photograph manipulation in journalism

• credibility of Doctors Without Borders
• stereotypes of African-Americans
• ex-spouses in family photos

(p14) The paragraph of radio and sound

• sound artists also manipulate audio
• similar to literature where people imagine pictures, but authors also manipulate literature greatly
• people also manipulate appearances beyond the digital world
• there has been critiques about manipulation being unnatural and unreal, but also the opposite that people should be allowed to pursue whatever they want

(p15) The example of not controlling how one’s photo will be edited

• if I were a farmer growing veggies, do I need to decide if they are going to be fried or steamed
• or, as I paid tuition for college, do I need to know or decide how they are spending every penny
• if they posted his unedited photo on the magazine, what about the magazine’s design choice/style/sense of professionalism
• what about manipulation in the photographing process, such as ISO, aperture, shutter speed

(p18) The paragraph of labeling edited photographs

• the era of guaranteed transparency has been long gone, or I wonder if it ever exists due to intransparency of human minds, such as in interpersonal relationships, when internet companies accessing personal information
• as for labeling, what about people with manipulated appearance, foods, social media posts
• what about the intentions behind manipulation, augmentation of human imagination such as after effects?

(p19) “However the malleability of the image, the ephemerality of the internet, the concentration on screen and speed, on the world of image vs. the world of things, will lead us into another conceptual space. What we are calling the digital revolution—putting information into integers—is a prelude to a much larger change in consciousness.”

(p125) Criticisms of photography

• “vanity medium”
• “in power can take advantage of its enhanced capability to deceive and more expertly project their own worldview, camouflaging it as reporting.”
• “They have long been decontextualized, misdirected, cynically relied upon to confirm certain values by those who control their use.”
• “The reader, unable to detect the alterations, can be deceived most of all.”

(p128) Thoughts of photography

• “various aesthetic, ethical, and journalistic dilemmas”
• “To what extent will these technological advances be employed to enhance the development of a derivative, postmodern culture, devouring its own past as it substantially alters our own collective memory? To what extent will they be used to control us, or self-aggrandizingly to promote a “God complex” among their users?”
• “The discussion should question the nature of photography and its potential role in our evolving society.”

My pioneer plaque is about the written languages of human beings. They include Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Dhivehi, Georgian, Gujarati, Hindi, Hungarian, Khmer, Kurdish, Lao, Myanmar, Sinhala, Urdu, and Yiddish. According to Google Translate, they each mean “welcome”. I would like to deliver a message that is at least not hostile based on human understanding.  I would also like to convey the information that human beings consist of different groups of people that have different languages and different stories.

I chose these languages because most of them resemble symbols, especially compared to the Latin alphabet. I also tried to avoid languages that are “common” in an attempt to bring attention to less used languages, while all of them, with numerous variations, have together formed the language system of human beings. Honestly, I think some of them have to be written horizontally or from right to left, but I make them in vertical shapes for my design purpose. I apologize for being random. It was really interesting to jot down these words in languages that are very different from the languages I usually use, while sometimes, I didn’t even know if the strokes were supposed to be one or separate.

I chose the system of language because I think language is a unique cultural phenomenon of human beings, not saying that other species do not possess languages at all. After all, human beings as a species mainly use language to communicate, especially written languages to pass on information from one generation to the next.

In Story of Your Life, Ted Chiang describes the heptapods speaking as “sounded vaguely like that of a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur”. Moreover, there have been people imagining their written language Heptapod B as a circle with several branches. Inspired by these, I made my pioneer plaque with ink to simulate the sense of moisture. It may be difficult to tell from my scanned image, but I drew on Xuan paper (宣纸) because it is a traditional combination with ink. I also think its rough surface would add more details and be more meaningful for heptapods to learn about human beings than an entirely white background with no texture.

I made the design into a circle, with each word string centripetal around the circle, according to the habits of the heptapods, so that it could “be read with equal ease however rotated”. I did not focus on making each stroke recognizable because I thought Heptapod B also has a sense of fuzziness since there should be many affixes, and sentences are written by “sticking together as many logograms as needed”. According to heptapod syntax, my message could be roughly translated as “Humans welcome” or “Humans said welcome”.

I’m aware that these are only 19 languages out of thousands of human languages, both oral and written. Ideally, the pioneer plaque would contain as many languages as possible, but I think it also makes sense for a pioneer plaque to contain only several languages.

Originally, I created a pioneer plaque with similar logic themed on make-up, but then I went with monochromatic in case the aliens do not have a sense of colors.

Here is my notes in Kami, but I guess only I have access to it?

Everything about the heptapod (and the human):

• Speaking
  • (p2) difference from human vocal tract/larynx
  • (p2) “sounded vaguely like that of a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur”
  • (p6) “I heard a brief fluttering sound, and saw a puckered orifice at the top of its body vibrate; it was talking.”
  • (p6) discourse patterns similar to humans
• Writing
  • (p8) “If the heptapods have a mechanical way of producing writing, then their writing ought to be very regular, very consistent. That would make it easier for us to identify graphemes instead of phonemes.”
  • (p9) “inserted a limb into a large socket in the pedestal; a doodle of script, vaguely cursive, popped onto the screen.”
  • (p10) have nouns and verbs, and verbs can be affixes to nouns
  • (p11) can be read with equal ease however rotated
  • (p12) like “intricate graphic designs.” “The logograms weren’t arranged in rows, or a spiral, or any linear fashion. Instead, Flapper or Raspberry would write a sentence by sticking together as many logograms as needed into a giant conglomeration.” similar to Arabic and zhaocaijinbao
  • (p13) “semasiographic writing”, “because it conveys meaning without reference to speech. There’s no correspondence between its components and any particular sounds.”
  • (p14) more syntax of Hetapod B (written/visual), “a grammar in two dimensions”
  • (p17) oral Hetapod A, “Heptapod A. It didn’t follow the pattern of human languages, as expected, but it was comprehensible so far: free word order, even to the extent that there was no preferred order for the clauses in a conditional statement, in defiance of a human language “universal.” It also appeared that the heptapods had no objection to many levels of center-embedding of clauses, something that quickly defeated humans. Peculiar, but not impenetrable.”
  • (p17) written Heptapod B, “Depending on a semagram’s declension, inflections could be indicated by varying a certain stroke’s curvature, or its thickness, or its manner of undulation; or by varying the relative sizes of two radicals, or their relative distance to another radical, or their orientations; or various other means. These were non-segmental graphemes; they couldn’t be isolated from the rest of a semagram.”
  • (p22) no preferred order in heptapod oral language, “there was no preferred order when reading the semagrams in a sentence; you could start almost anywhere in the nest, then follow the branching clauses until you’d read the whole thing.”
  • (p23) “That meant the heptapod had to know how the entire sentence would be laid out before it could write the very first stroke.”
  • (p32) “Semasiographic writing naturally took advantage of the page’s two-dimensionality; instead of doling out morphemes one at a time, it offered an entire page full of them all at once.”
• Appearance
  • (p5) “It looked like a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs. It was radially symmetric, and any of its limbs could serve as an arm or a leg. The one in front of me was walking around on four legs, three non-adjacent arms curled up at its sides.”
  • (p5) “Seven lidless eyes ringed the top of the heptapod’s body.”
  • (p5) “I could see the texture of its gray skin, like corduroy ridges arranged in whorls and loops.”
  • (p10) “they had an orifice on the underside of their body, lined with articulated bony ridges: probably used for eating, while the one at the top was for respiration and speech. There were no other conspicuous orifices;”
• Science
  • (p19) “Any hypothetical path would require more time to traverse than the one actually taken. In other words, the route that the light ray takes is always the fastest possible one. That’s Fermat’s Principle of Least Time.”
  • (p20) “the heptapods’ idea of what’s simple doesn’t match ours”
  • (p21) “both were systems of describing the same physical universe”
  • (p22) heptapod planet, “the heptapods’ planet had two moons, one significantly larger than the other; the three primary constituents of the planet’s atmosphere were nitrogen, argon, and oxygen; and fifteen twenty-eighths of the planet’s surface was covered by water.”
• Logic
  • (p31) “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.”
  • (p32) “For them, speech was a bottleneck because it required that one word follow another sequentially. With writing, on the other hand, every mark on a page was visible simultaneously.”

Other Thoughts:

• (p3) “The less the aliens knew, the better.”
  • also how the aliens keeping saying their purpose is observation?
  • reminds me of Chain of Suspicion
  • and if the aliens took the initiative to have contact with humans, does it imply their confidence, transparency, etc.?
  • (p17) the aliens seem really cooperative and peaceful to the point of talking about math
  • (p27) “I know that the heptapods have occasionally stopped talking to us for brief periods.”
• Why the descriptions of memories/predictions with her daughter are in future tense and not in chronological order?
  • What is their relationship like? Why do they both seem so tense and rebellious? Are these descriptions related to the title Story of YOUR life? 
  • (p21) If these observations are something happened in the past/imagined to happen in the future from a mother’s perspective, it seems so detailed and trivial that the mother does not seem a linguist but rather a heptapod.
  • (p25) “Hmm, that sounds familiar, but I can’t remember what he called it.” There is past tense involved.
  • (p27) “Hmm? Sorry, I was distracted. What did you say?” her memories/imaginations happening at present
  • (p33) “At that stage of your life, there’ll be no past or future for you; until I give you my breast, you’ll have no memory of contentment in the past nor expectation of relief in the future…. NOW is the only moment you’ll perceive; you’ll live in the present tense.” ???
  • (p33) “they don’t act according to their will, nor are they helpless automatons… They act to create the future, to enact chronology.” ???
  • (p33) “Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with ee will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don’t talk about it. Those who’ve read the Book of Ages never admit to it.” ???
  • (p36) “I have glimpses when Heptapod B truly reigns, and I experience past and future all at once; my consciousness becomes a half century-long ember burning outside time. I perceive—during those glimpses—that entire epoch as a simultaneity. It’s a period encompassing the rest of my life, and the entirety of yours.”
  • (p39) “Working with the heptapods changed my life. I met your father and learned Heptapod B, both of which make it possible for me to know you now, here on the patio in the moonlight. Eventually, many years from now, I’ll be without your father, and without you. All I will have left from this moment is the heptapod language. So I pay close attention, and note every detail.”
• (p35) “My world-view is an amalgam of human and heptapod.”
  • yes like how eastern languages and western languages have different orders

The song is called Dream of Sky from Dancing Line, a mobile music game.

Here is the music sheet, and here is the video.

Second version of my delivery:

Developing from the first version and emphasizing the senses of being floating, three-dimensional, and in motion, I expanded the parts where I used the Algerian font. I created a 6×3 grid with only the two horizontal lines in the middle parallel with each other. The Algerian font letters fall onto these grids, and the rest, which are Curlz MT font “o”s, “q”s, and “u”s fall in the blank space between the lines. The more towards the bottom, the larger and denser these letters. I kept the ascending “w”s because I thought it would add something different from the rest, and the sections of the dense notes like 2323271 are very typical in the song. Additionally, I added a white Edwardian Script ITC font “S” in the middle. Not only because “sky” starts with “s” but also resembles a treble clef. More importantly, it makes the composition seem “windy”.

First version of delivery for the mini critique:

I would describe the song as high, lively, and hopeful. The four black blocks made with overlapping letters represent the four or so louder notes starting at 00:57. The letters come from the title Dream of Sky. I also want them to represent floating islands or anything floating in the sky. I tried to use the Algerian font with shades and the belt made with “v”s to add the sense of floatiness and dimensionality. While exploring the idea of “expansion” with “v”s, I tried to apply “effervescent” with “o”s, “q”s, and “u”s with the Curlz MT font for the same purpose. I think these letters resemble lanterns, balloons, and clouds, and the curvy strokes seem more “hopeful”. I used the Paintbrush Tool to draw the path of “w”s, in an ascending form. I was also exploring the combined patterns of “L”s and “H”s, making them resemble ascending stairs and ladders as well as representing the sections of the dense notes, such as 2323271. I made all the letter patterns with some sort of breaking spaces in between to seem more “lively”.

I first started with four possible songs of my choice:

I finally went with the third one, which was Dream of Sky, and I listened to it again, marking down more details in order:

I also gathered some inspirations of typography patterns and general compositions:

Here is my export:

I first drafted these, and then I executed them in Adobe Illustrator with reference lines, which are some of the blue marks in the draft:

I will post my final pieces first, and then explain my process.

These are my two thumbnails, the first one titled The Dusk and the second one titled The Dark Forest: 

Just like how the name indicates, the first one is a depiction of a setting sun above water. The top two blocks are the sun, both with some fragments on the outer side of the one fourth circle that can be interpreted as the blurry outlines of the silhouette or flying birds. The two bottom blocks are the reflection of the sun. The waves make the shapes linear and discontinuous instead of round.

The second one is inspired from a sci-fi The Three Body Problem. The top right block is a cut of three overlapping circles indicating the three stars. The bottom left block is a depiction of the dark forest, a theory of cosmo-sociology inside the book. The top left and bottom right parts are supposed to be like how high dimensional objects fall into low dimensions. For example, four dimensional objects fall into three dimensions. During the process, some objects lose their original shapes.

These are my two one-block pieces, one is the version of The Dusk and the other of The Dark Forest:

The Dusk has a similar logic to its thumbnail version, and I made The Dark Forest into a round shape because on the one hand, the warping surface from four dimensional space to three dimensional space is presented as a spherical shape in the book, just like how there are several soap bubbles on a piece of paper. On the other hand, I wanted to use the round outline and the sharp triangles inside to emphasize the tension of dimensionality reduction.

Just to clarify, these are how the fragments of the overlapping circles work:

Back to how I started all these, it was really difficult to ideate from nothing. The few restriction, such as the dimensions of the papers, allows a lot of freedom but also makes it difficult to narrow down my ideas. I tried to determine my themes first, and I finally went with dusk and The Three Body Problem among several other words that I brainstormed, and these are my original proposals that I created with GoodNotes:

I also gathered more inspirations over the weekend:

 

It took me a lot of time to actually execute these plans. Sometimes, I had to cut the pieces first and then test where to place them, and cutting the tiny pieces and using tweezers to glue them made me dizzy. Special thanks to my family :333 who inspired and helped me a lot during my design process of One Black Square!

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