a comment offered in response to the previous 'big shed' post planted an idea in my head, and got me thinking about how to _spell_ sounds. some, i've concluded, are simply unspellable, at least using the alphabet i've grown up with.
last year i made an audio piece about slide projectors and wanted to title it with the sound of a slide dropping into place for projection, just as the carousel advances...but i couldn't figure out how to spell this. in my head, it came out kuh-chunk, but if you read that out loud (which i hope you've just done) i think you'll agree that you didn't sound anything like a slide projector. maybe if there was an umlaut or something, over the second u...
in the end, the piece was (and still is) named "autofocus," (actually the sound of my projector's autofocus is a quiet, sturdy and comforting one, and is not too hard to decipher somewhat reasonably in english: whiirrrhhrrrrh) which is ok, but of course now that i'm thinking about it again, i'm wondering how one _could_ spell the projector sound. or the sound of the dog's nails scraping on the floor every time he gets up from resting. or the sound a peeler makes, when stripping a carrot. or the sound of fingers on a keyboard, in the earliest morning hours...
p.s. relevant, but just barely: remember these?
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