Vaporwave and Unicode Analysis

This article will explore the unique role that text plays in vaporwave music and art. Why do vaporwave tracks, albums, and artist names use stretched out ｆｕｌｌｗｉｄｔｈ text, Japanese writing 変, and 𐒖Ƭᖇ𝚫ƝǤⵟ looking Unicode characters? Why are track titles sometimes formatted to look like FILENAME.AVI or Muzak Corp™ Song Title?

Analyzing the text characters that accompany vaporwave can help us understand vaporwave a whole. How so? In her book "Because Internet", linguist Gretchen McCulloch compares the challenges of analyzing speech at scale, with the ease of analyzing internet writing. Speech requires time and resources to decipher and process. Internet language, on the other hand, is easier to work with. Because text on the internet is public and digitized, McCulloch says it readily "brings new insight to classic linguistic questions".

The same logic applies to vaporwave. While scholars, podcasters, YouTubers, and music fans have worked to decipher vaporwave's sounds and images... we will focus on the text.

We've analyzed the text that accompanies more than 800,000 vaporwave tracks, from 2010 to present day. We've scraped track titles, album titles, artists names, and metadata from SoundCloud and Bandcamp; to learn how how vaporwave came to be, how the aesthetic has evolved, and where its headed next.

We have a YouTube video exploring many of the same ideas in this article. If you prefer watching to reading, you can check out the video below.

Also, if you're just looking for our vaporwave text generator, you can find that tool here. Otherwise, read on...

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/ISFtsD2