Connected Everything

Here are some things I'm going to be covering in my thesis.

• All possible enumerations: "Wishing Well" by Eijssen and Klopman, "Borges" by Jochem van der Spek, Every Icon, God's Eye, Imagen, Magic Mirror, The End, 8-bit, 4-bit waveforms (also in hardware). The legal-political implications of these projects. Stéphane Mallarmé's "[dream] of a universal work, capable of encompassing all the others". Ablinger's conception of "all notes" as "white noise". Borges' Aleph. pppd and RC/NAND combinations toward the idea of a "functionally complete" synth.
• Possible permutations: allRGB. If you're enumeration everything, how do you arrange it in an interesting way? Anti-gray codes?
• Very long pieces: Pi house music (indefinitely long), Infinite C (indefinitely long), Soundtrack For An Exhibition (96 days), The Shapes Project, As Slow as Possible (639 years), Longplayer (1000 years)
• What is music? Of all the sounds that can be made, which are musical? Is there a connection between meaningful sounds and musical sounds? Considering noise as a human-centered phenomenon, or otherwise.
• McLuhan's symbiotic medium/message relationship: Photoshop Gradient and Smudge Tool Demonstrations. Glitch art as a method for uncovering a medium: Ceibas, MPF, CD-glitching from Oval and Yasunao Tone. The aesthetics of failure. "Looking at what's broken" is a technique regularly used in cognitive neuroscience, outlined by V.S. Ramachandran in "Phantoms in the Brain". Eigenradio. The role of transcription: ethnomusicology as a case study.
• The history of MP3, the language and the logistics behind glitching compressed formats. Remixing 4'33" for a new media (Only Everything Lasts Forever).
• Correspondence theory of truth versus coherence theory of truth, the connection between truth and meaning, meaning and music. MOOKDFJLAL and 241543903. Side channel attacks (especially TEMPEST), persistence hunting, and reality cracking. Buddhist "interdependent arising" as a "coherentist metaphysics". Autoloop as purely sonic coherentism. Jean-Jacques Nattiez' "symbolic web".
• The role of illusion in meaning, finding patterns in noise, and the "edge of chaos": Kanizsa triangle, dalmatian and cow illusions, Christian iconography, The Holy Toaster, the face on Mars, Einstein's Brain, the golden ratio as a guiding principle for beauty in nature and art, prime numbers and the Ulam spiral and Sacks spiral, equidistant letter sequences and The Bible Code, Haiku Finder, SETI@home and the definition of a signal, astronomical patterns and constellations, geographic patterns, the Voynich manuscript as a hoax. Working with Mark Changizi on evolutionary psychology. No Noise.
• Emptiness, and art everywhere: Cage's 4'33", Duchamp's "Fountain", Rauschenberg's "White Paintings" and the monochromatic tradition, including Malevich and Rodchenko. Nietzsche's "will to power" and Sartre's "existence precedes essence" as models of self-created coherentist meaning.
• Noise and copyright: illegal numbers, pi in binary.

Chunking Language

When we need to copy something we'll shift our focus from the source to our copy, back and forth, until we're done. A simple revelation: the number of symbols we can take in one glance is directly proportional to the information density and our fluentness.

For me to transcribe Chinese, I have to study each stroke; for Russian, a word at a time; in Spanish, whole phrases, and in English entire sentences, or multiple sentences. The more fluent you are, the easier it is to see the effect of information density: it takes more glances to copy from an encyclopedia than a novel.

This effect seems to appear in all sorts of languages: when I first started writing in classical staff notation, I had to count lines and study each note. Over time, I was able to glance at entire measures. Code is another interesting case: depending on how often you write in a language and how verbose the syntax is, you can take in bigger or smaller "chunks" at once.

I'd expect this is all because we can only keep so much in our immediate "working memory" at once, and the more constrained something is by our "long-term memory" the more information we can store (essentially because it's compressed as references). If we can show a more direct relation between our familiarity with a symbol and the speed at which we copy it (or, the size of our chunks), this could be developed into a technique for mining word frequency information.

Brainwashed by Reality

From Wired:

After four days on an intensive Photoshop project... everywhere I looked I had the impulse to correct things, to move the world around in layers.

We underestimate our brain's plasticity... just think about the diversity of roles we can fill. It's not like this is some superfluous yet extraordinary ability, it's essential — from birth we are specializing ourself to our surroundings, assimilating things like language. The difference between our own incessant, passive adaptation and active brainwashing is not necessarily the truthfulness of the beliefs, just their origin.