My audio work serves as an attempt to demonstrate the thinking within my essay – that orthography can be used as a new means of graphical scores -considering the semantic, aesthetic and physical motion of inscription all at once. I found that by returning to my original concept of ‘scoring a word’ , I was able to, piece-by-piece construct my own kind of graphic score.

To do this, I began to create several cards, each inscribed with a singular word or phrase – making use of various fonts or stylistic effects within the lettering, providing further opportunity for sonic experiments within my ‘scoring’.

I then began to individually ‘score’ these words according to the principles I had set out in my essay.

For example, with the word buzz I (quite literally) chose a crackling static tone derived from two sawtooth waves – which themselves were inspired by the twin z’s within the word. Furthermore, I included a sharp, static tone that sounds twice, representing the use of same letter twice.

Another example, this time derived from the phrase ‘ringing in the distance’ – inspired by the phrases used in guqin notation techniques. I drew the majority of the sound itself from the semantic image of a noise reverberating away in the horizon – with the ‘flow’ of the sound conducted by the physical shape,- the rise and falls of each letter.

Before long, I had accumulated a large sound palette. Unlike my usual practice, I didn’t take much notice of musical key, as my interest lay in the potential of unknown harmonies and dissonances that may emerge in the process of arrange each sound into a larger composition – whether any words may compliment each other, like a cohesive sentence, or sit starkly opposed , like drunken garbled nonsense.

To further emphasise this factor of ‘unknown potential’, I shuffled each of the cards and began to draw them blindly, arranging them into a ‘timeline’ format. I had now, randomly generated a full sentence – dictating the order in which I would arrange each sound in the composition.

The resulting effect was surprisingly cohesive, perhaps (to my weakness) due to some unconscious desire to derive musical harmony or textural balance. Yet, this approach also saw me weave many sounds together in ways I normally would not in my own practice, blending harsh static tones with lush, expansive drones.

This methodology also provided a compositional quality that I rarely feature in my own work. In my practice, I tend to create pieces that exist as one, large expansive sound containing multitudes of layered textures all at once, however here, in this sequential ‘sentence’ format I feel as though the different sounds were able to have their own presence individually.

As a final touch, I made field recordings of my immediate surroundings in order to give the piece a spontaneous, intimate feel, tying everything together.