Morse code is one of the most famous codes in the world, where letters and numbers are transmitted as combinations of short, monotone bursts of audio, known as dot and dashes. People who have been trained can listen to a stream of these pulses and understand the messages they contain, whereas untrained people just hear what sounds like a jumble of noise.

Morse has very rigid structure. However long the sound used to represent the dot, the duration of a dash is three times it’s length. Each dot or dash is followed by a short silence, equal to the dot duration. The letters of a word are separated by a space equal to three dots (one dash), and the words are separated by a space equal to seven dots.

Morse code is rarely seen in ‘written’ form, but in my XMorse series I’ve used this formula, or a derivative, to create simple, minimal graphic pieces where the dots and dashes are represented by different shapes, signifying the letters and words of the encoded message.