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jliat: still life #5 -- six types of silence cd

This latest installment in the Still Life series trades the brevity and clarity of the previous two (Jazz and Rock and Roll) for a rather enigmatic, lengthy, and potentially destructive silence. 'One of the fascinating things is that given the medium of CD (16 bit 44.1khz) you can have upwards of 65536 types silence - all silent but in all the tracks there is different data. As an artist working in this area I find this weirdness intriguing. The permutations of the data are staggering as are the ideas associated in such very minimal works. For instance, by mixing short lengths of these silences, all the other sounds which you can hear on a CD are produced. Given that CDs are *just* numbers other things arise -- just the first second of a CD has 65536 to the power of 44100 variations -- working through these you have the first second of any/all CDs From 'My Way' to Beethoven's 5th. However this number is quite large -- there are only 10 to the 79 protons in the universe. So although we can 'hold' these CDs in our head -- there is probably insufficient matter and time to make them all. This (Still Life #5) continues the series of works made by writing data directly to a PCM file. In this work there are 6 ten minute pieces made by setting all values in a track to the same binary values. There are 65536 possible values in all -- and so this number (6) of potentially similar tracks. All result in producing silence -- though all these silences are not the same. Pausing the playing of a track will show this to be so, for the data being played is halted and the CD system jumps back to zero -- resulting in a click (if the value 'playing' was not zero or near to it). Interestingly this click is heard but is not actually on the recording -- it physically doesn't exist. It is the interference of the continuos stream of data which causes the sound. Maybe cosmologicaly things are created out of similar emptiness, or a jump between two nothings. So each continuous set of binary values will be rendered by the CD player as a DC voltage - which could be dangerous to the electronics and speaker systems in some Hi Fi Equipment. This is because playing a silence which is based on a very high or low binary value at high volume will produce a high DC voltage in the system. This could cause overheating of speaker coils and other electronics.' -- James Whitehead


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