yellow creates:
Sound Talk.
sound emoji system
2016
Every song is like a piece of article. They tell stories, discuss questions, or simply convey emotions. They talk to us through lyrics, and the melodies are their tones of speaking. But without the lyrics, they become beautiful poems, with deeper, and purer meanings. Though the feelings we have will differ from person to person, and there might be thousands of ways to explain the same poem; the process of thinking, guessing, or feeling it without any thought, have made it worth more than any sentence.
The Sound Talk system is an in-app function, which allows people to send sound clips or riffs to others through applications like Facebook messenger, or WhatsApp, to express thoughts, convey information, or to arouse certain emotions. The system is designed especially for those who have a close relationship with each other such as lovers, best friends, and family members. They probably share the same memories and experiences, so the conversations will be easier, and have more privacy, and this is also the main goal of the Sound Talk: to create a secret environment for people to communicate.
However, the number of emotions is unlimited, and so as the sounds. Therefore, the Sound Talk system will grow endlessly, like the emoticons will be released one after another, and this is just a start.
The tracks were divided into three groups---Subjects, Emotions, and Place. The users can decide the tracks they want to define. All tracks are original and were composed base on the result of the experiments I designed. The experiments also use colours as signifiers of the thoughts and imagination of the participants. But colour is just a way to display. It doesn’t change the essence of the sounds.
Sound Talk is very easy to use, just like how you do with the existing emojis. The only difference is that the users can define each sound with other users whom they want to share the secret language with. But this is totally up to the users whether they want to do so or not.
From the tests and experiments, I found that some of the couples prefer using the sound to simply express the feelings of places, actions, or states of mind which are unable to be verbalised. In that case, the meanings of the sounds would be fluid and based on the context. In fact, this is the optimal way to use the Sound Talk System from my point of view.
The experiment I designed were divided into two sections. In the first part, I asked the participants to describe the music clips they heard with colours, and draw out the proportions of each colour when they need more than two colours for one track. All clips were from existing music I picked.
In the second part, participants were asked to do the same thing, but this time, all tracks were just simple chords or sets of chord progressions especially designed for arousing particular emotions. The reason why I use colours as standards is that people seem to have some kind of agreement on what colour arouses what emotions. For instance, bright colours are often considered 'happier' than dark colours, and the saturation decides how 'aggressive' or 'passive' they are.
One of the participants doing the experiment.
The answers to each track done by five of the participants.
From the results, we can see that people have similar feelings on some of the tracks. For example, almost everyone chose to use a blueish colour to define the last track. Even when the colours are not blue, they tend to be brighter and lighter. I also asked them to explain their answers to words or drawings to make sure what did they mean when using certain colours.
Base on the analysis of the experiments, I designed the prototype of the Sound Talk system. All sound emoji for experiments can be found below. (The name of the tracks are just for references.)