Simple clear advice in plain English

Avant-garde Unicode hypnosis

All the Unicode characters in order. Yes, it's more interesting than it sounds

image-of-letters-in-the-incolsolata-font

The Unicode character set is one of the great unsung heroes of computer technology, allowing people around the world to use computers in their own languages. 

Because modern computers were developed by English-speakers, for a long time computers were Anglophone-centric, using the limited Ascii character set (which is why you sometimes see strange characters on websites where non-Ascii accents - é - or signs - ` - have been used). Unicode fixes that by allowing several language sets inside a single font.

Artist Jörg Piringer has made a video of it - each character in the set is displayed, one frame at a time.

There are 65,535 available characters, of which 49,571 are used, so the whole video is around half an hour long. It may sound boring, but with the soundtrack (of which more after the jump) it's strangely hypnotic:

The Metafilter thread in which I read about it points out that the soundtrack, which sounds at first like the random thumps of a drum pad, may actually be the sound of a voice reading each letter but being cut off almost as soon as it begins.

It's oddly reminiscent of Autechre, which gives me a good if tangential excuse to post the band's song Flutter below. Flutter was on the 1994 Anti EP, released to protest the same year's Criminal Justice bill which proposed to criminalise (after a fashion) music with 'repetitive beats'. So Flutter doesn't have any repetitive beats at all. Enjoy:

display:none  

Add your comment

Please keep comments constructive and free from abuse of any kind and swearing. If you wish to link to a product or service online, please do so in such a way that makes it clear that it is not spam. If you are connected to any such product you should make that clear.

We may use your comments in the magazine. We may edit your comments for clarity or to remove unacceptable material. We will attribute your comments but not share your email address.

We request your email address and record your Internet Address (IP address) in order to block spam from our site. We will never share this information without your permission.

All comments are reviewed by the Computeractive Team before being published. Please bear with the slight delay this causes, you don't need to post more than once.

Click here to read our Privacy Policy

Click here to read our site Terms & Conditions

Recent blog posts

A new home for the Caps Lock Alert program
Hosting the files for the Caps Lock Alert program on Dropbox wasn't really working. Not least because...

Gmail users: The dot in your email address is irrelevant
For the last few months I've been getting someone else's emails. Recently I received an invitation to...

Minecraft comes to the Raspberry Pi
Great news for all Raspberry Pi owners, especially those hoping to keep their children interesting in...

The broken promise of smart TVs
Smart TVs, or internet-connected TVs as they should really be called, were supposed to make watching...

Updating your subscription status Loading

Most popular articles

No matching document

Poll

Do you have Windows 8?

Jargon Buster

Computing terms explained in plain English

VoIP

Voice over IP. The routing of voice conversations over the internet, which is cheaper than the telephone...

Great shopping deals from Computeractive

Information currently unavailable