Written words imitating sounds I heard on the train. I realized after coming to the Netherlands that I say a lot of gibberish to imitate sounds or actions in the same way onomatopoeia does except that I make them up.
I collected sounds, or noises, that I hear on the train with a Muji pen on a B6 notebook. It started at the beginning of fall break this year when I forgot my headphones at home, so I had no choice but to accept that a notebook and a pen would be my companions for the trip. Feeling light and empty in a good way, the kind of feeling one would get after finishing a task, I didn’t really have anything in my mind to write so I started giving myself prompts to do on the train. It happened that that day the train was full and chaotic. I started writing out the sounds that I heard, all the noisy noises. The smoothness that came from the union of this pen and paper, and the unstable bogie led me to a kind of script that was satisfying to write…….
As a Thai that uses English and with a background in Japanese and Korean languages, I made an attempt to translate sounds on the train in the same way as how I would try to say those sounds to a person. It resulted in a semi-new script with its own grammar.
This website has a size of 1.7 MB and does not contain javascript. Handmade by Anna Srikitkul with guidance from Quentin Creuzet for the third year coding class at Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK), 2025.
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How to Read
Motif as a Syllable Sounds are divided into motifs. Each motif is contained in a square of 1000 upm (units per em). Each square is treated as a syllable.
으
Syllable Construction As I translated the sounds into onomatopoeia, a sound would contain an initial consonant and a vowel with an optional final consonant. All components in a sound are contained in a square similarly to Hangul. Initial consonant would be on the top or top left of a square. Vowel would be in the middle or top right. Final consonant would be at the bottom.
Consonant Consonant letters are based on latin alphabet with additional letters created for the sounds that don’t exist in English. (Click on this topic for the consonant list!)
/g/ ᄀ
/t/ ᄃ
/dt/ ᄄ
/ʔ/ ᄆ
/p/ ᄈ
/s/ ᄉ
/ts/ ᄊ
/w/ ᄋ
/tɕʰ/ ᄌ
/tɕj/ ᄍ
/f/ ᄑ
/h/ ᄒ
/ŋ/ ᆷ
/st/ ᆼ
/y/ ᆰ
Vowel Vowel letters are all invented taking inspiration from the mouth shapes when each vowel is pronounced. The sounds of the vowels themselves are based mostly on Thai vowels. The list here contains both long and short vowels.
/eː/ ᅪ /e/ ᅨ
/ɯː/ ᅳ /ɯ/ ᅱ
/uː/ ᅮ /u/ ᅫ
/iː/ ᅵ /i/ ᅴ
/ɔː/ ᅥ /ɔ/ ᅬ
/oː/ ᅩ /o/ ᅭ
/ɤː/ ᅧ /ɤ/ ᅰ
/aː/ ᅡ /a/ ᅢ
Tone Tone or pitch is based directly from Thai tones which consist of 5 levels. (You can compare the differences in the audio.) Tones are indicated with colors ranging form the first, second, third, fourth and fifth level of tones, from lowest to highest pitch respectively.
5
4
3
2
1
Sound Source The mechanical and non-mechanical indicate the sources of the sounds that I understood at the time of listening. Used before the sounds to indicate the sources of the sounds that follow.
mechanical 1
non-mechanical 2
Feeling Feelings the sounds gave while I listened to them. Used before the sounds to indicate the feelings of the sounds that follow.
neutral 3
soft 4
harsh 5
Sounds that continue A lot of sounds on the train continue for awhile. For this I use circles to indicate how long the sound continues.