In Information Design with Kryzstof Lenk at RISD, we were asked to create our own instrument with ordinary household items, write a song, and then create a novel notation for our instrument.
After some awkward experientation in my house (to my roommates’ amusement), I found that striking a partially filled aluminum water bottle could create a rich variety of sounds. Depending on the angle in which you held the bottle, the air in the bottle resonates in different ways and can produce different frequencies.
While the design of my notation was much more minimal and simple than other classmates, I put a lot of thought into exactly what I wanted.
When dealing with information that people need to work with in real time, the diagram needed to be simple and quickly interpretable by the reader’s brain. So when planning and sketching out how I wanted to design my notation, I wanted to start at the very fundamental variables. How would I illustration time? Action? Intensity? The original idea was to represent each variable separately but I soon realized it would be hard for the reader to interpret multiple sources of data at once. Then I thought, why not incorporate all the information into one single symbol – the bottle itself – and represent different variables by varying simple visual attributes?
The result is what you see above.
After the initial designs, I was still somewhat uncomfortable with my representation of time. While representing time as distance on a line seemed like the best or only way, it was unclear how fast the reader’s eye should move along the line. What was the conversion for a unit of distance to a single unit of time? In addition, having to translate spatial distance into temporal distance added a layer of complexity to the notation that would have to be further interpreted by the reader’s brain. Perhaps I was thinking too much about it, but background as a student of science would not let this issue to ease. I decided the only way around this problem was the transcend the restrictions of print and make a notation that could directly represent time.
As a result, I built this interactive notation as a side project.
Sketching process:
