3D Scanning as Dense Microphone Array

Sound is the displacement of matter over time.

A microphone detects sound at a single point, either via direct physical coupling, or using optical methods (as with Laser microphones).

3D scanning can also detect displacement of reflective matter over time. Using a 3D scanning setup with a very large angle between the camera and projector, very minor displacement variations can be detected. Using a high framerate camera, this displacement can be measured at audio frequencies. Every pixel then corresponds to a virtual laser microphone: instead of the usual microphone at a point, a fringe analysis microphone is comprised of N points as determined by the camera resolution.

Eigenanalysis for Lossy Compression

Eigenanalysis is a method for reducing a set of data to the principle dimensions along which that data varies. In the context of imaging data, it has been applied very successfully to Eigenfaces:

Where a set of faces is broken down into a smaller set of face "prototypes" that can recombined in varying portions to recreate the original data set with a limited accuracy.

In the context of music, I can imagine that the spectral characteristics of songs have some self-similarity: portions repeat, chords are repeated in different voices and different octaves, rhythms repeat, etc. I can imagine a lossy compression algorithm that takes the frequency domain representation of a song, does Eigenanalysis on these vectors, and stores the song simply as the collection of N eigenvectors and the reduced representation of each frequency-domain chunk.

Quantization methods may be employed for further reducing bit usage due to similarity between adjacent chunks. Or different portions of the spectrum can be analyzed separately, which allows for better representation of lower frequencies and less information dedicated to higher frequencies. This unfortunately does not account for the obvious relationship between the lower and higher frequencies.

A more advanced implementation may involve doing eigenanalysis on mutiple chunks simultaneously in a moving window, or at different scales, which will help with rhythmic repetition.

The octave or overtone relationship is a little more complicated, and would require something like a constant-Q transforms to get a logarithmic frequency domain.

Precision CD Glitching

"Wounded" CDs have been prepared by artists like Yasunao Tone and Oval, encompassing the experimental and pop domains of music, respectively. In both cases, the music has to be re-recorded from the glitched CD to be heard (and in Oval's case, it is subject to further production). Why not use a laser cutter to make precision glitched CDs, allowing them to be distributed directly?

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.

Defining Music, Again

I keep coming back to this issue (previously: Defining Music). Which is fitting, considering it's a large part of my thesis. I explained the basic idea to a friend recently in a way that seemed clear, so I'd like to preserve that clarity in text.

Before Ethnomusicology, western culture believed music to be universal amongst civilized peoples. Ethnomusicology helped people see that music was more local and less global. Around the same time, Cage encouraged people to hear things for themselves as music: saying that it is extremely local, to the point of being defined by an individual.

I would like to propose a reversal to Cage's position (or, at least, his language). I believe music is built out of correspondences between sounds and other things. Over time, these "other things" have been comprised of innate human impulses, society-specific tradition, and individual preference, in that order. I would like to add "everything else" to that category of "other things". This means that music exists without humans, as sounds always have context. Individuals do not decide what is music (this is the reversal), we can only decide what is noise. We do this by identifying acontextual sounds — and the context we use for understanding sounds is continually changing. Wind chimes ringing during a cool autumn walk have a different context to us than they do when we're trying to study next to them, or trying to hear past them.

As context-creators, of the general category of conscious non-omniscient beings, we define music only insomuch as we misunderstand some of it as noise.

Face the Beat

I See Beats, but with face tracking. This would solve dark room restriction, but create a host of other issues.

The Negativity of Noise

In "Noise", Jacques Attali proposes that noise is a simulacrum of murder.

We must establish two things: First, that noise is violence: it disturbs. To make noise is to interrupt a transmission, to disconnect, to kill. It is a simulacrum of murder. Second, that music is a channelization of noise, and therefore a simulacrum of the sacrifice. (p 26)

He goes on to provide a technical description for the uninitiated:

A noise is a resonance that interferes with the audition of a message in the process of emission. A resonance is a set of simultaneous, pure sounds of determined frequency and differing intensity. Noise, then, does not exist in itself, but only in relation to the system within which it is inscribed: emitter, transmitter, receiver. Information theory uses the concept of noise (or rather, metonymy) in a more general way: noise is the term for a signal that interferes with the reception of a message by a receiver, even if the interfering signal itself has a meaning for that receiver. Long before it was given this theoretical expression, noise had always been experienced as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages. In all cultures, it is associated with the idea of the weapon, blasphemy, plague. (p 26-27)

I can't deny that there are technical definitions of noise that restrict it to the "undesired portion" of a signal. And I completely understand that a variety of cultures see noises as violent. And that we have an intuitive reaction to them as violent.

But saying that noise "does not exist in itself", and advancing the technical definitions or intuitive folk-definitions as the final word on noise seems narrow minded to me. What about noise in an epistemological context, as a human creation: without humans, there is not only no music, but no noise. It's not that noise requires music in order to be differentiated, but it requires humans to do the differentiation. This act of sound-interpretation and categorization is equally important as our technical and folk definitions.

Furthermore, I reject language like this:

In its biological reality, noise is a source of pain. Beyond a certain limit, it becomes an immaterial weapon of death. The ear, which transforms sound signals into electric impulses addressed to the brain, can be damaged, and even destroyed, when the frequency of a sound exceeds 20,000 hertz, or when its intensity exceeds 80 decibels. Diminished intellectual capacity, accelerated respiration and heartbeat, hypertension, slowed digestion, neurosis, altered diction: these are the consequences of excessive sound in the environment.

I reject it because it's conflating two very different phenomena: noise, and damaging sound. Saying that noise is a source of pain, and then giving examples of loud sounds and high pitched sounds is just giving noise a bad name by association. If I play a Bach chorale at 80 decibels, it's going to do just as much damage as "noise".

Ignoring Africa

I'm always a little surprised when I read things like this:

All music can be defined as noise given form according to a code (in other words, according to rules of arrangement and laws of succession, in a limited space, a space of sounds) that is theoretically knowable by the listener. Listening to music is to receive a message. Nevertheless, music cannot be equated with a language. Quite unlike the words of a language — which refer to a signified — music, though it has a precise operationality, never has a stable reference to a code of the linguistic type. Itis not "a myth coded in sounds instead of words," but rather a "language without meaning." It has neither meaning nor finality. (Noise by Jacques Attali, p 25)

Pranks and Pragmatism

Some excerpts from "African Rhythm and African Sensibility" by John Miller Chernoff.

African drumming is renowned for the ability to express the tonal structure of their spoken languages, to the point where rhythms are imbued with complex semantics. A great illustration:

During my first day practicing with Gideon, I was following him well until he suddenly performed a rather complicated series of rhythms and then went back to the basic rhythm he was showing me. A few minutes later a man who passed at that moment returned with two bottles of beer. (p 75)

There is a short passage discussing the difference between "false meaning" and "intended meaning", due to a prank:

Ibrahim Abdulai's son Alhassan, who was assisting in my instruction displayedgreat ingenuity duringan extended prank in which he tried to confude me in my work by inventing false meanings to fit many rhythms in Takai [a dance/beat from the Dagomba in northern Ghana]. Many of the rhythmic styles a Takai drummer beats are played only to make the music more interesting, but the language Alhassan supplied matched the rhythms so perfectly that I began to think Ibrahim was withholding the meanings. When I persisted in my questions, he said, "We have a general name for the whole Takai drumming, but only a few of the rhythms have names. In Zhem [another Dagomba dance/beat, played "during the "installation or funeral of high chiefs"], all the drummers will be making speeches, but in Takai the rhythms are mainly to make the dancers strong. The name given Takai is for the different rhythms combined together, and all the rhythms are equal. Anyone who wants to tell you words for these rhythms is lying. Anytime I want, I can just listen to the sound of the dondon [an hourglass-shaped talking drum] or gondon [sic? "gongon"] and compare the music to something in the Dagbani language [of the Dagomba], but it is not the same as making speeches. As for the styles you have been learning, I am the one who has been bringing all these styles when drumming Takai, and I am the right person to give them meaning, but I have no name for them. So how can another person give them meaning or say that this style says this or that style says that while I was not making speeches when I got those very styles?" (p 76)

Another example is given of a "false meaning" for a dance, Bangumanga, that is regularly accepted by "junior players":

The drum language is Bem bo ma, be pam boma je ("They will search for me, but they will not see me"). One false meaning is Man daa yeli, mam bi lan yeli ("I said it; I don't say it again"). The meaning is a "secret" because of the seriousness of the war. In its truth, Bangumanga recalls the blood that was shed in the war... (p 206)

Sometimes the meaning of rhythms is simple misunderstood.

If you play gagedega instead of gagedegi when executing a phrase on Atsimewu [a tall drum that acts as a lead], or if you miss the pitch when beating a dondon, you may have a more serious mistake than you think. Indeed, one of the reasons why repetition is so important in African music is that repetition of a rhythm often serves to clarify its meaning. When rhythms change too abruptly, the music can lose some of its meaning... (p 80-81)

This tendency to court misinterpretation can be heard just by listening to the complex polyrhythms of any West African dance:

The effect of polymetric music is as if the different rhythms were competing for our attention. No sooner do we grasp one rhythm than we lose track of it and hear another. In something like Adzogbo or Zhe, it is not easy to find any constant beat at all. The Western conception of a main beat or pulse seems to disappear, and a Westerner who cannot appreciate the rhythmic complications and who maintains his habitual listening orientation quite simply gets lost. [...] Actually, if we try to apply Western notions of bars and time signatures, the music seems much more complicated than it really is. [...] The individual rhythms are simple, but the way they are combined can be confusing to Westerners. (p 46-47)

I see these stories as beautiful metaphors for, and examples of:

• Information having a noisy character (the beer story)
• The difference between intention in sending and receiving
• Our ability to find structures that have a different cause than we expect
• Repetition as the foundation of meaning, a type of contextualization that allows us to separate "signal" from noise
• The interaction of repetitions producing more complex structures than the sum of their parts (in the case of polyrhythms, it's their least common multiple)
• Our ability to misunderstand a system based on the wrong contextualization (the last example of Westerners misunderstanding polyrhythms)
• Combinatorial music in general

Signals and SETI@home

SETI@home is a distributed computing project scanning the sky for radio transmissions that bear traces of extra terrestrial intelligence. They define a "signal" as:

• Spikes in power spectra
• Gaussian rises and falls in transmission power
• Triplets (three power spikes in a row)
• Pulsing signals

Some of these are domain specific (Gaussian rises and falls are due to the telescope passing over a signal source), while others can be generalized. For example, triplets represent a kind of repetition. When you have two of something, there is ambiguity about whether it is chance or not. You can always fit a line to two data points. When there are three events, you can measure the similarity of the two intervals, and make at least three comparisons. Pulsing signals represent another kind of macroscopic repetition. There are really just two types of features: general (repetition), and domain specific (power spikes, Gaussian rises and falls).

Autotune the Past

1. Pick a famous speech (e.g.: "I Have A Dream")
2. Run it through Anteres' autotune.
3. Run the result through Microsoft's SongSmith
4. Share

Cage vs. Pascal

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating... We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. (John Cage, 1961)

Le bruit a sa musique que la musique ne connaît point. (Pascal)

Ways of Defining Music

The "is-ought" problem is common to meta-ethics and linguistics. In meta-ethics: are we describing how people act, or how they ought to act? In linguistics, some people describe grammar while other prescribe grammar. I imagine the same approaches to understanding music:

1. Descriptive definitions of music, which take into account various musical traditions and extrapolate common themes within and between them.
2. Prescriptive definitions of music, which involve reflection and thought-experiments — philosophy, really — sometimes accompanied by experimental compositions.

To explore the first without the second is superficial, and to philosophize without context is unrealistic.

1/26/08: "Noise" has the same issue, describing how the word "noise" is used is very different from prescribing definitions. Describing things can be difficult, but prescriptions can get really messy. It's probably best to set out a goal for a prescriptive definition before seeking/giving one. Prescriptions might be about: unifying themes of descriptions, offering a new definition that illuminates others, expanding or restricting the dominant contemporary definition...

Speech

Using a Microvox text-to-speech module, generate every possible vocal sound sequence. Potential interpretations:

1. A panoglot box.
2. A lying box.
3. A truth-telling box.
4. A future-predicting box.

Defining Music

"Music" has always been "meaningful sound"; but the definition of "meaningful sound" has not always been the same.

• Pre-Cage: meaning is found in your local culture. One culture's music is another culture's noise.
• Cage: meaning is found in your personal experience. One person's music is another person's noise.
• Post-Cage: meaning is found in contextualization. There is no noise, only sound that is more or less contextualized.

12/27/08: I still agree with the distinction between the three stages above. I'm less certain about "music" being "meaningful sound". By extension, "art" is anything with meaning. However, there are many things that people with pre-Cage (pre-Duchamp) — or even Cagian/Duchampian definitions of art — would call "meaningful" but not "art". The beep of a crosswalk has a meaning, but is not often called "music". Is there anything in common between Cage calling the crosswalk beep "music", and a pre-Cage audience calling Debussy "music"?

Have we ever called meaningless things "art"? Very briefly, when Cage or Duchamp were busy with 4'33" or "The Fountain". With those transitional exceptions, then, "art" is a subset of "meaningful things".

Three sets:

1. A Art.
2. M Meaningful things.
3. U The universal set.

Three steps (where ⊂ means "strict subset"):

1. Pre-Cage: A⊂M, M⊂U
2. Cage: A=M, M⊂U (not quite right, because of the crosswalk problem)
3. Post-Cage: A=M, M=U

1/22/09: Music is not necessarily "meaningful sound", but music is "named" the same way meaning is "named". Naming, and meaning, has always come from contextualization, but we've imagined contextualization differently over time.

1. Pre-Cage: societies are the contextualizers, deciding what is meaningful, what is music, etc.
2. Cage: individuals are the contextualizers (remove society).
3. Post-Cage: nature itself is the contextualizer (remove the individual), and humans identify subsets of these relationships.

Transcoding-based art (i.e., visualization, sonification...) and highly analogical explorations (e.g., VJing as an analog to DJing) can be heavily Post-Cage in that they acknowledge the many possibilities, and that they are sampling a subset of those relationships.

8/18/09: Attali has a note on these ideas in Noise, p 25:

In fact, the signification of music is far more complex. Although the value of a sound, like that of a phoneme, is determined by its relations with other sounds, it is, more than that, a relation embedded in a specific culture; the "meaning" of the musical message is expressed in a global fashion, in its operationality, and not in the juxtaposed signification of each sound element.

In short, while considering the origins of music, he identifies the pre-Cage contextualizers (society/culture) as bestowing meaning upon music.

The Same Old Song

An instruction piece and concept album:

1. Make friends with 3 street musicians.
2. Record them every day for 3 weeks.
3. Make 3 songs, where each song consists of the 3 weeks mixed together.
4. Do this in 3 different cities.

April 12, 2009: The accessible version.

Pure Analog Pedals

Sometimes, instead of using electronics for processing audio we'll use air. Many different buildings are designed with their acoustic properties in mind. I've heard that high end studios sometimes have adjacent rooms meant solely for generating reverb. You can submit files online to the Tank or Silophone for natural processing.

Why don't we make guitar pedals like this? Obviously a small box won't have much reverb, but we could produce distortion. For example: a small speaker, absurdly overdriven, and a small mic picking it up.

I am Sitting in an Automatic Translator

Alvin Lucier's best known work fed to the engines at Free Translation and Google about 6 times back and forth from Simplified Chinese:

I sat in a room different from the one you are now. I recorded my voice of opinion and speech, I will be back to repeat any room drama until the clock speed of a room, I echo the rhythm of speech and perhaps their own similar exception, were defeated. You will hear, then clearly from the echo of his speech is the frequency room is a natural gift. I do not like such a vulnerable to him, have once again demonstrated the fact that natural things, but take off any more of my freedom of speech might have.

Cage and Affect

John Cage appreciated natural sounds. Striving to produce similar sounds, he attempted to remove any of his intentionality from his music making: imitating nature, he used chance events.

But maybe when we follow chance events, we don't make nature-like sounds. They're nature-like in that they have the same underlying order, but not in the experience. The average person might sometimes listen to rain, but not to Cage.

Perhaps in order to imitate nature we must act very unlike nature? Perhaps our best approximation of nature cannot come about by imitating its processes, but by analyzing its results?

Random Audio Effects

If you drop electronics components randomly, solder nearby ends together randomly, and pass some kind of signal through them... most of the time, nothing interesting will happen. Is there a way to do this where more interesting things necessarily happen? Perhaps if you were to modularize "interesting filters" and drop the filters at random? How simple could the filters be?

One way to implement this: use tons of through-hole components and multiple layers of randomly generated PCB layouts set up with the holes in a grid.