Every month have a particular celebration, or as I like to call it “a nice excuse to create a graphic”.

February is a love and music month, so a month earlier I started planning to create a way to visualise the language thought music, I have to admit that the SCMP is very open mind to explore new ways to tell stories or even just experiments like this…

Speech spectrum of “I Love You”, the red dots are my key points to make a new sound.

Anyway, the idea came while I watched the spectrum of a voice record; there I began to think what if the instruments can be adapted to languages, how can sound a phrase of an instrument in Spanish, French, German, Chinese… and, if already some instruments have particular sound linked to a particular culture and language.

I started by adding key points to phrases like “I love you” in different languages, and then I should try to explain that to musicians, editors and partners (that does not goes very well at the beginning), but after many sketches they got the idea and the process began.

Sounds synthesized from voice recordings

Synthetized instruments spectrum

I create a few concepts for this graphics before get the final data using Google translate, with the inspector tool I catch the speech, then I create a new sound with synthetizers, and back to the visuals again to work with an approximate spectrum.

Google translate, voice render.

Visual layouts for the project.

The results were interesting, so next we make records of some people speaking in the final selected languages (English, Spanish, French and Cantonese) that suppose to be reference point to the musician, but we didn’t use his interpretations because the deadline was approaching and he don’t send us the files on time. So at the end the instrumental interpretations were made by synthetizers. If you are interested in learn more about the making of the sound, visit to the special feature and tap on “How it works”

Take a look in to the project:
http://multimedia.scmp.com/culture/article/valentine/#