Author: Frank Armstrong
Title: Hearing Type
Source: AIGA Journal of Interactive Design Education
Date: June 27, 2005

Abstract of Major Ideas
In his paper Hearing Type, Frank Armstrong describes an interesting analogy between music and both static and kinetic typography. He compares specific properties of music to typography including rhythm, melody, and harmony. Rhythm can be used to describe type in many ways, such as shape, strokes, and punctuation for both moving and static examples. Melody is the message or meaning of the type, while harmony describes the interaction of columns or lines of type to each other.

He also compares an individual glyph to a sound or tone, using the amplitude to describe the weight of a character, duration to the width of a series of glyphs, pitch to the vertical positioning of the type, and timbre to the color, texture and style of the type. Armstrong suggests that using such analogies can help students better understand both static and kinetic typography by providing a different perspective or frame of reference.

Critical Evaluation of Major Ideas
It isn’t difficult for one to visualize comparisons between audible tones in music and glyphs or phrases of type. Armstrong also brings up the example of sheet music to strengthen his point. Certainly sheet music is another form of typography and is used to produce music output as sound, just as type, when read, produces audible speech. Armstrong quotes musicians, typographers, graphic designers, and physicists who have made similar comparisons.

These analogies might be useful in the ways that Armstrong suggests. I know from teaching audio production that I frequently use visual analogues to describe sound, such as comparing bitmap imagery to digital audio. There seems to be a shortage of adjectives in the English language that are used exclusively to describe sound. When we describe the timbre of a sound we use words like warm, cool, crisp, bright, or dark. All these words are usually used to describe other things like temperature, color or texture.

I agree with Armstrong’s position. It’s often very useful to compare and contrast different art forms. I think it is also important to look carefully at what the differences are between these art forms as well as the likenesses, so that students are getting the whole story.

Implications for Design Education
Armstrong’s paper raises an interesting perspective within the field of typography. The essence is that music and type are both forms of language; therefore they have parallels that can be illustrated to give students and designers a new frame of reference that might provide inspiration. I would not discourage instructors from using similar analogies, but I would suggest that they also make it clear that typography is not literally sheet music (although it could be interpreted as such through the use of visual scores), just as spoken text is not necessarily musical.