"Around 1985 I started to write sound poetry… I learned the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)… IPA did not have symbols for many of the voice sounds I used to make, and I started to extend it with signs of my own invention. This developed into Blonk's IPA Extended (BLIPAX). It turned out that many of the symbol of BLIPAX were not contented with an existence as dead letters, but took on a life of their own… It resulted in drawings that live somewhere halfway between sound poetry and visual poetry: Traces of speech. The basic idea for this book/CD package was firstly, converting the drawings into electronic sound by importing them (mostly as raw data) into audio software, and secondly, converting them into texts (in English and German) through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software."--From the artist. Text in English and German. Edition of 100. Signed by the artist.