#27 The Culture of Listening

ISIA – Higher Institute for Artistic Industries - Urbino

ISIA – Higher Institute for Artistic Industries - Urbino

Kurt Schwitters, 1927

NEUE PLASTISCHE SYSTEMSCHRIFT. Like many new experimental types to arise from the early twentieth century avant-garde in Europe, Schwitters’ type is an attempt to remake the Western writing system through reduction, and the abandonment of idiosyncrasies. Schwitters proposed a monocase system, adopting a rectilinear interpretation of roman capitals, and contrasting these with six vowel alternate characters, A, E, I, O, Ü, and Y scaled to the same height but based upon Carolingian lowercase. The vowel alternates, though primarily used for the short sound, are used somewhat indiscriminately in his print work. Unlike his contemporaries, Herbert Bayer, Theo Van Doesburg and Jan Tschichold all who produced experimental universal alphabets that rejected uppercase, Schwitters retained the form of roman capitals.

George Bernard Shaw, 1912

SHAVIAN ALPHABET. The Shavian alphabet is conceived as a way to provide simple, phonetic orthography for the English language to replace the difficulties of the conventional spelling. Shaw set a criteria for the new alphabet: it should be as phonetic as possible. The Shavian alphabet consists of three types of letters: tall, deep and short. Short letters are vowels, liquids and nasals; tall letters are unvoiced consonants. A tall letter rotated 180°, with the tall part now extending below the baseline, becomes a deep letter, representing equivalent voiced consonant.

Herbet Bayer, 1959

FONETIK ALFABET. In 1959, he designed his fonetik alfabet, for English. It was sans-serif and without capital letters. He had special symbols for the suffixes “ed” “-ory”, “-ing”, and “-ion”, as well as the digraphs “ch”, “sh”, and “ng”. An underline indicated the doubling of a consonant in traditional orthography.

Alexander Melville Bell, 1867

VISIBLE SPEECH. In 1867, Alexander Melville Bell published the book Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetics. The book contains information about the system of symbols created by him that indicates the pronunciation of words so accurately that it represents even regional accents. Melville Bell’s intention was to create a script in which the characters actually look like the position of the mouth when they are being pronounced. The system is useful not only because its visual representation mimics the physical act of speaking, but because it does so, these symbols may be used to write words in any language, hence the name: Universal Alphabetics.

Microphone

MICROPHONE is an experimental typeface designed by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones for the periodical Fuse #15 cities, in 1995. “There are six million stories on the naked city”. The idea was to take fragments of conversations from people which where then used as a character set in the Microphone typeface. One single character in Microphone represents a phrase with an individual style, size and spacing that reflects the voices heard on the street. Microphone is different from the rest of the typefaces because it consists of text that is read more like a short story.

Jan Tschichold, 1926 /29

UNIVERSAL ALPHABET. This alphabet has been designed to clean up the few multigraphs and non-phonetic spellings in the German language. He devised brand new characters to replace the multigraphs “ch” and “sch”. His intentions were to change the spelling by replacing systematically “eu” with “oi”, “w” with “v”, and “z” with “ts”. Long vowels were indicated by a macron below them, though the Umlaut was still above. The alphabet was presented in one typeface, which was sans-serif and without capital letters.

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Citofono di una via di Urbino, nel luglio 2009.

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Confessionale nella chiesa della Maddalena in Piazza della Maddalena a Roma, nel luglio 2009.

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Telefono pubblico in Borgo Mercatale a Urbino, nel luglio 2009.

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Call center in via Emanuele Filiberti a Roma, nel luglio 2009.

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Confessionale nella chiesa di San Macuto, in piazza di San Macuto a Roma, nel luglio 2009.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1928-2007

Hello! Repeat please. Hello! Is changed, of course. I’m always right. Mr. Stockhausen? Yes I am. Can I… No you can’t. Try to say “hello” more quiet, pretend to have a little pillow in your mouth. Hello. AH! Perfect. Wait, I’ve to record it. Wait wait wait.

John Cage, 1912-1992

Who is there? Hi, this is John Cage! I’m here in the 6th Avenue and there’s a good traffic today. What? I said there’s a good traffic today! And I want to advise you! Stop listening music and come down! You don’t need music! You don’t need someone talking! The activity of sound is enough. We don’t need sound to talk to us. And today the traffic sound is awesome! Ok John I’m coming!

Arrigo Lora Totino, 1928

Hello. Good morning Miss. I’m Arrigo Lora Totino and I would like to invite you to my next performance of liquid poetry. Uh, poetry you said... I am not used to read poetry. You don’t have to read, it’s a kind of sound poetry Miss. The phonetic aspects are foregrounded and the performance becomes the thing in itself. You will feel the poetry, the real poetry, with the ears and with the eyes. Sounds interesting. And what means “liquid”? I’ll explain it: with a hydromegaphone, built by my friend Piero Fogliati, I’ll try to declaim the language of fishes and other sea stuff, speaking through the water inside the hydromegaphone. Mmm... sounds funny. It is funny... It’s like a cabaret. I love cabaret. I will be there! Ah, Mister Totano* (* Squid)? Do I need an umbrella?

Robert Schneider, 1961

Hello. Mr. Schneider? Yes? Oh hi! I’m Elias, the character of your new novel. Hi Elias, everything ok? Yes! Finally it happened. I see the air condensing and then expanding with incessant rhythm. I see the sound valleys and their giant mountains! Perfect! Congratulations Elias, thank you for calling.

La Monte Young, 1935

Hey La Monte, can I ask you something? Of course... How can you stand the wind sound during the storms? At night I can’t sleep!! It’s easy, you can’t turn off the wind like you would turn off the radio. When the wind comes it goes on as long as it is going to last. You would find it to be very profond and very awesome.

Philip Glass, 1937

Who is there? I’m Philip, your neighbour, I just want to thank you. Thank you for what? For the noises coming from your apartment, the washing machine, the dishwasher, the mixer... Oh I’m sorry Phil, I didn’t want to disturb you! Disturb me? Not at all! Your noises revealed me the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music!!! What? I don’t understand... Of course you don’t understand, you are accostumed to the use of rhythm in western music, where the time is divided, but if you were interested in the indian music you would have a very different conception, and you would appreciate the beats coming out from your apartment, that string together make up larger time values! Do you understand now?

Luigi Russolo, 1885-1947

Hello? Bzt... bzzz... It’s me, Luigi What? I don’t understand anything! I’m Luigi... bzzz... Luigi Russolo Who? Who is there? Bzzz... bzt I can’t hear anything, there is a disturbing noise in the entry phone. Bzzz... Disturbing noise? You really believe that noise is disturbing? Our entire life is accompanied by noise! What do you mean? The noise is familiar to our ear, the sound instead, this occasional and unnecessary element, is alien to our life, but we forgot it a long time ago. Bzzz… The irregular confusion of our life create the noise which reaches us in a confused and irregular way. So we have to select, coordinate and dominate all the noise to increase our sensual pleasure... bzt