THE INVISIBLE RESONANCE: SIGNS, SOUNDS, AND WEAVES AS LANGUAGES OF THE LIVING

| By Eleonora Giglione |

In the beginning was the sign, and the sign was vibration. Even before words, before thought itself, communication takes shape in the essential patterns of nature: in the celestial rotations, in the geometry of a snowflake, in the propagation of waves. Every living being generates and interprets signs: from the tilt of a leaf to the direction of a herd, from the flutter of wings to the echo of a whale’s call. The universe itself, in its deepest structure, seems to move according to logics of repetition and variation, rhythm and interference, like a cosmic score in constant rewriting. This drive toward form is also inscribed in sound. Acoustic waves, as they travel through air or water, act upon matter: they arrange it into designs. Cymatics experiments have shown that when exposed to specific sound frequencies, a surface of sand or powder generates perfect geometric structures—mandalas, crystals, or organic networks. These emerging patterns constitute a form of writing: a physical, prelinguistic notation that reveals the profound kinship between sound and sign.

Human beings have always sought to translate the flow of sound into a visual code: a system that allows music to be preserved, transmitted, and interpreted beyond the moment of listening. Musical notation was born from this need. The earliest forms of sound writing, from Mesopotamian cuneiform signs to medieval neumes, were already attempts to translate musical gesture into trace. Over time, notation evolved alongside the ear and musical thought: from Greek tetragrams to the modern staff, capable of indicating pitch, duration, timbre, and dynamics with increasing precision.

Yet the twentieth century, with the explosion of the avant-garde, marked a rupture. Traditional notation was no longer sufficient to represent contemporary sound, which became gesture, space, body, electricity. Iannis Xenakis, architect and composer, developed graphic systems derived from stochastic calculations, transforming scores into dynamic maps. His works like Metastaseis and Pithoprakta are true sonic architectures, drawn more with rulers and compasses than with notes. Karlheinz Stockhausen designed flowing forms, spirals, temporal diagrams, proposing open scores where the performer acts as an explorer. Luciano Berio, in his Sequenza III for solo voice, traced a notation where every subtle vocal gesture was annotated: breaths, syllables, micro-intonations. No longer just notes, but embodied phonemes, remnants of speech, tensions of the body.

Some composers went even further: Anestis Logothetis created abstract scores composed of symbols, lines, and color spots, leaving great interpretive freedom while deliberately stimulating new sonorities. Sylvano Bussotti produced genuine graphic artworks that defy classification: scores or drawings? Writings for sound or for the gaze? Here notation ceases to be merely functional and becomes aesthetic material. Many late twentieth-century scores, exhibited in contemporary art museums, question the boundary between musical language and visual art.

These writings do not aim to be mere transcription tools: they are visual works in themselves. Some, displayed in museums and galleries, lose their musical function to acquire an aesthetic one, interrogating the very status of notation as art. Other examples, such as the graphic scores of Cornelius Cardew or Earle Brown, adopt open symbols, calligraphic signs, colors, and abstract textures that converse with contemporary painting and automatic drawing.

All the languages of the living intertwine in a semiotic ecosystem: animal communication, electrical transmission in plants, mycelia connecting trees and spreading information, lichens living in interdependence between algae and fungi and building complex symbiotic relationships over time. In these biological networks, there is no separation between information and matter: the message transmits through variations in humidity, electrical impulses, and structural modifications. It is an embodied, distributed semiotics that human thought today strives to understand through new scientific and aesthetic paradigms.

Human anatomy also participates in this dialogue. Speaking, singing, listening engage a complex network of muscles, membranes, fluids, bones, synapses. The voice arises from airflow passing through the vocal cords but takes shape and resonance in the thoracic cavity, skull, nasal sinuses, and the articulation of the tongue. And in listening, sound transforms into vibration, then electrical impulse, and finally perception. The mind not only receives but reconstructs, interprets, and connects what it hears with what it already knows. Every sound heard is ultimately a reconstruction.

Within this framework, one understands that the correspondences between sound and sign are more than metaphors: they are concrete bridges. Today, systems are being experimented with that transform sounds into fabrics, scores into meshes, frequencies into textures. Digitally generated acoustic patterns can be converted into weaves, turning sound waves into grids for textile printing, reactive material construction, or smart fabric design. The reverse is also possible: an embroidery can be read as a temporal sequence, a textile can suggest a composition.

Particularly fertile is the hypothesis of starting from ancient textile patterns dating back millennia and transposing them into sound. Some cultures, such as the Andean or Mayan, encoded linguistic or ritual functions in their textiles. The analysis of these weaves, now entrusted also to artificial intelligence systems, can become musical material: the alternation of colors, the repetition of shapes, the geometric proportions can suggest intervals, scales, rhythms. Making a textile resonate means making a culture speak again. An ancient carpet, a ceremonial tunic, a traditional ornament can become living scores, giving voice to what has remained silent for centuries.

Music itself can also become a generative seed for graphics, textile art, and fashion. A composition, analyzed in its structural elements, can generate visual patterns, suggest textures, guide the rhythm of a collection. In some experimental practices, sound frequencies are used to shape garments, generate reactive surfaces, or create systems that change according to the acoustic environment. Music and fabric intertwine as mirrored languages, both capable of telling, evoking, protecting, and transforming.

At the core, what unites all these inquiries is the awareness that every form is also sound, and every sound is also form. Drawing, music, gesture, and weave are not separate compartments but different modes of reading and rewriting the energy that flows through us. The sign, whether inscribed, woven, sung, or danced, remains our deepest way of inhabiting time.

The text is accompanied by illustrated plates and an audio track composed by Ask The White. The audio is accessible by scanning the following QR code. The track is transcribed from a visual score presented in one of the images, where a dialogue between a bird and a woman is visually expressed through codified symbols, many of which are part of the avant-garde music semiotics of the 20th century.

Ask The White

Listen here:

https://soundcloud.com/askthewhite/invisibleresonance

website: https://askthewhite.weebly.com/

bandcamp: https://askthewhite.bandcamp.com/album/sum-and-subtraction

Caption for the illustrated plates

© Isobel Blank, digital sketches for future visions, variable dimensions, 2025
All symbols in the plates are drawn from contemporary musical semiotics. Each sign corresponds to a precise sonic gesture, codified and interpretable according to the criteria of experimental and graphic notation.

Sources and references
Iannis Xenakis – Formalized Music, Pendragon Press
UPIC System: https://xenakis.web.auth.gr/en/node/134
Karlheinz Stockhausen – Texte zur Musik and graphic scores: https://www.karlheinzstockhausen.org
Luciano Berio – Berio Foundation: www.lucianoberio.org
Roman Jakobson – Linguistics and Poetics, Harvard University Press
Monica Gagliano – Thus Spoke the Plant, North Atlantic Books
Bernie Krause – The Great Animal Orchestra, Little, Brown