Experimental zine exploring language cadence of syllable-timed romance languages through audio visualizers created using Max MSP/Jitter. Printed on 15 x 22.75'“ newsprint. After studying abroad in Lisbon in the spring of 2023 I became fascinated with language cadence and the rhythm of spoken word. As Brazilians we often receive comments from European Portuguese speakers that our dialect sounds “cantado” or sung. Reflective of popular perceptions of Brazil’s an easy-going, celebratory, and musical culture in contrast with the people of Portugal’s more serious and pensive demeanor.

This got me thinking about the character of a language and its people and how we might measure and represent vocal rhythm between languages. I started by researching language cadences and how we measure these rhythmic divisions. Isocrony is the postulated rhythmic division of time into equal portions by a language. Most romance languages (Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Italian, Catalan, and Romanian) are syllable-timed languages meaning that they have an equal amount of time between syllables.

Using this framework I looked into meter poetry and chose 5 poems in each language to act as samples for the visualizations. In traditional poetry, most language follow a particular meter, English famously being Iambic Pentameter, but others include Alexandrine and Hexameter. I am fortunate enough to have friends and family that speak all of these languages and recorded samples of them reading out each poem. I then dove into audio visualizing software and experimented with different models of representing my recordings using Max Jitter/MSP. Each composition is a translation of not the poem’s meaning, but the spirit of its given language through a built digital framework of translation.

Translation is commonly thought of as transferring words from one language into another. Priorities vary, but in mainstream translation clarity of meaning is the goal. There is a certain restriction to this, it is truly an impossible task of wrapping a piece embedded in its particular cultural, situational, and temporal framework in the cadence of another. Something is lost and gained in the act of translation, and the translator’s fingerprints and indelibly carved into the text. In the process of art making, whether that be through visual, auditory, or written there is another form of translation, the transformation of one form into another. Ideas onto canvas, image into word, experience into film. Isocrony attempts to translate not meaning into content, but rhythm into a visual expression.