Summary: December 2013, Typeradio held a two day workshop in cooperation with Indra Kupferschmid and 10 students of the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste (HBK Saar) in Saarbrücken, Germany. Each student was assigned a typeface, designed by a Dutch designer, along with the assignment: ‘translate the typeface into a one minute sound piece’. The resulting 10 sound pieces were the starting point of another workshop, in collaboration with Jan Willem Stas and the students of the Type]Media 2014 typography master coarse in The Hague, The Netherlands. Each T]M student was handed an (anonymously labelled) sound piece and their challenge was to ‘create a typeface concept inspired by the sound’. The results were quite surprising! 1) Original typeface: Laundry by René Knip 2) Sound piece by Merle Sommer 3) Chinese whispered typeface by David Chmela As David first listened to the soundtrack, it seemed just a bunch of strange sounds. So he did a little sketch of the whole track and realised that the individual sounds represented the letters of the alphabet. The sounds reminded him of hardware stuff from workshops, analog machines, intermittent by clicking and a crowd in the background. David: “My idea was to create a kind of analog machine that makes type, so I made set of stamps that I used to create individual letters. The final design of the alphabet is influenced by typewriter, one of my associations related to the sound.”
