Reflective Essay

The International Phonetic Alphabet was a very interesting topic to do this project on. Phonetics and phonology are very interesting subjects to me. They are important because we use them on a daily basis, throughout the day. This is the groundwork for all of our communication and communication fuels our lives. It is interesting to consider that as powerful as language is, it starts with these topics of phonetics and phonology. For that reason I wanted to do my project on them. It is also fun to see how many different sounds and types of sounds exist in human language.

The first part of the art process was to give a bit of background on what the IPA is on the first part of the concept map. This was to explain what it is and how it works. This is the part that I was familiar and comfortable with because it is the straight-forward information that I have learned in classes.

After this I added a couple more pages to the website: examples in world languages, and examples of sounds in human languages. These pages are where I placed the photos and videos of the project. These consist of the different charts in the IPA, and a video from Youtube of different sound pronunciations. Although they don’t seem very “artistic” per say, it was fun to incorporate many different aspects into the project. For example, there is now visual, acoustic, and informational content in an area that I before would have only thought of as informational.

I also added a picture I made in photoshop as the header image on the home page. For this picture, I found a picture on Google that artistically represents the power of phonology and phonetics. I made this picture the background of the photo, and lowered the opacity for it to remain black and white and less opaque. Then, on top of that I put a red text of my name in standard English spelling. I made this a cooler red and lowered the opacity by about ten percent. Then, in a brighter red color, I hand drew with the brush tool my name in IPA to show the contrast between the two.

Overall, I really enjoyed this project. Linguistics is something I really enjoy studying, and to incorporate art into this topic was fun.