x

jliat: still life #4 - rock and roll 3" cd

Recently I have begun to use a computer as the source of creating music or sound pieces. This process arose out of a posting on a news group - Jacob Jarnigon posted an enquiry to the newsgroup alt.noise concerning "All frequencies combined?". This began a line of thought/enquiry which resulted in this recording. The nature of a sound file containing data set to its maximum value, i.e. all binary 1s was raised. This interested me sufficiently to write a program which would create a .WAV file containing PCM data set to either maximum or minimum values. Nigel Orr of The Underwater Acoustics Group at The University of Newcastle Upon Tyne amongst others (Wolfgang Schwanke, Francis Vaughan, Darryl & mk) pointed out -my poor physics! and that such a bit pattern would give DC- i.e. silence. What I heard on playing back my first file was a 'click' followed by silence. The click was created by the initial jump from zero? to the value set in the PCM data. Any set of continuous values produced silence, random values gave white noise, blocks of alternating high/low values when even gave tones, when uneven buzzes and clicks. Over a few days the sound of that digital click made by my first PCM wave file stayed with me- from the silence of maximum values the click- a change in state of the system- represented the beginning of all possible other recordings. This began a line of thought/enquiry which resulted in a series of recordings of which this is an example. It consists of a four minute 3 inch CD made by writing consecutive blocks of code beginning with a single word set to +32767 followed by 44100 of words set to zero. Other thoughts.Maybe cosmologically things are created out of similar emptiness, or a jump between two nothings, nothingness is also a mystical idea of the absolute. it is the source of a creation physically and spiritually. The emptiness of the holy of holies.the nakedness in the garden of Eden .John and Yoko's two virgins.the Naked Emperor in the fairy tale implied in the title of Penrose's book on the new physics.the story of the hoodwinking- is this how reality is created. The Danny Kaye song "The King is in the altogether". The King maybe naked when thinking he was wearing fabulous clothes, but perhaps this nakedness is in fact more beautiful in its essence than any superfluous decoration. So the criticism that there is nothing or nothing much here on the record missed the point, that this is true of everything?


available now