The feedback I received in my first tutorial confirmed my suspicion that I had a compelling subject, but had not yet landed on a winning investigative method.
Counting sounds lacked depth to make it interesting, and the abstraction of sound needed to be able to tie the conclusion to the premise. The typographical experiment resonated the most, and it was suggested I explore this space further to see whether I could flesh out a full narrative.
During this week I went back to the McLuhan reading The Medium is the Massage having been piqued by the idea of how prehistoric societies communicated using their ears, while writing turned our eyes into arbiters of truth.
I decided to explore the beginning of written history to understand how people first visually communicated sounds and concepts. This led me to Assyrian cuneiform alphabets, a series of triangles and dashes derived from earlier pictorial symbols depicting the world of the ancient Sumerians.
My work this week explored the creation of a semantic alphabet for the list of sounds I had gathered. Using lines and circles, I built a series of symbols that I felt captured the tonality or meaning of the sound it represented.
Once I drew all 53 sounds, I then attempted to write short narratives with the symbols.