Recurring Dream

I experience a recurring dream: In the dream I am aware of an object (house, flower, doesn't matter). That object is vanishly "small." I consider the object. Then as I understand the object a new version of the same appears behind it. It is ridiculously "large." Going back and forth between this small and large version of the object makes my head hurt. The only way I can describe it is to say that my mind "glitches." It is a very peculiar feeling. I've had this glitch in waking times, but not very often. If it lasted more than a second it would be debilitating...

These dreams started for me very early on. Like in kindergarten times, as best I can fix them. That's way before I ever knew what a "fractal" is. That freaks me out a little bit.

I wonder: is nature recursive? We know recursion lends itself toward explanations of objects we see around us. Nature seems at its core a "feed-back" system. But the math we use to model these objects is not something which scales naturally.

What does the computational system of the universe look like? How does it work? I'm thinking that our mathematics needs to incorporate recursion as a basic given. Not as something we afix later on (in advanced computational science, at best). Consider the amount of precision required to perform an "integration." Can the universe really compute with infinite precision? Or is it limited to quantized interactions? My bet is on a fixed amount of computational power and hence precision to the world at large.

I wish I knew more math... :)

On Multi-Dimensional Time, Time Quantization and the Nature of Reality

That's a pretty audacious blog post title...

By way of background: I've been wondering for some time how a photon "experiences" the universe. That has lead me to reading up on quantum physics, relativity, string theory, and the "arrow of time," among other things. I'm not even close to pretending I understand all the evidence and current theories. I got into physics basically by wanting to know how the universe really works. I did study physics in college (as a minor), but I didn't do all that well. I always thought I was seeing equations fit to evidence, especially in undergraduate thermodynamics. That's what scientists do, fit experience to their ability to make predictions. It's fine, but I always wanted to get to the core of things.

Anyway what I'm curious about is something which follows from relativistic treatment of energy vs. mass. It seems to me that photons are basically frozen in time, "to us." Yet if you were a photon what would your experience of the sub-light-speed world look like? It seems obvious to me, though it is just a leap of faith, that photons themselves transit "time." Yet in a different way...

So, questions, suggestions, hypotheses:

Can a particle move in "space" but not in "time?" If so could that knowledge be used to explain wave/particle duality? What about the ability to explain quantum "probabilties?"

Regarding wave/particle duality: let's imagine that a photon is trapped to only explore time dimensions orthogonal to "ours." By doing so it seems apparently frozen in time. To us. But what about its interactions with other photons (apparently travelling non-orthogonal bases re: each other)? Can we explain the apparent ability of photons to the see the "future" as a compression in our time-basis? How can a time-static (in our basis) particle do anything other than experience all of our times at once? That's the idea...

Regarding probabilistic outcomes in quantum physics: "Probabilities" suggests to me too little information to make specific predictions. Can we use the notion of multi-dimensional time to help understand the empirical evidence we see for probabilistic particle-particle interactions? In essence we may never be able to reach the information needed to make non-probabilistic predictions for specific interactions. But knowing that the time-frame interactions involved are the reason for that uncertainty seems to be a potential step forward.

It seems interesting to me to consider the notion of multi-dimensional time. I haven't got a clue as to how to wonder about this more rigorously, though. One extra topic which I believe fits into the notion of how reality "works" is drawn from computational theory: recursion. We know that the world is a giant feed-back system. But is it quantized in terms of information? Is there a finite amount of information and thus computational ability present in the workings of the universe? I have a few thoughts on that but generally speaking it feels to me like the universe cannot be capable of supporting an infinite level of precision. And so everything is quantized...

Galen Wade - The Scuttlebutt - kfractal remix, tracks

gw-tsb-rmx.txt
master not normalized
original master
drumkit track
all tracks without comp
guitar scratch track
hook and guitar track
glitchy track
piano track
spectral drone track
vocoder melody track

Micachu sound...

snowflakes and drummer boy songs

apropos of weather events... snowflakes at high magification. i worked on a snowflake generator a few years back.  the pictures came out very similar... no, really :)

also, music.  good exercise i suppose to work on rendering a song you already know.  the little drummer boy.  this is a favorite of mine...

more universe-as-lava-lamp action

harley 2 pukes carbon dioxide snowballs and gushes ice.  but only when it gets close enough to the sun.  it would be interesting to hear the ice cracking and hissing as it gets thrown off.

stunningly cool music and vid

this is awesome in ways i don't even know about yet :)

On a Hill pad remix

I always wondered what the term "pad" meant in terms of music.  I think it means "padding" as in adding space, filling in... something like that.

Anyway I added some to on-a-hill.mp3 to generate on-a-hill-pad-remix.mp3.  The "spacey" quality has been enhanced, I think.

On a Hill

Here's a new tune I used Butte to generate.  On a Hill.mp3.  Enjoy...

Phasers to Stun!

If you play two beat patterns versus each other at different, but similar tempos they slide against one another... in effect they go in and out of "phase."  I'd never really listened to any example of this at length until I started picking up some Steve Reich tunes on Lala (see for example "Piano Phase".

I never have really tried this myself but for grins I put together a bidule for doing just that.  What you'll hear in 122v120-rpeg-rotator-shifty.mp3 are two horn lines.  One is running through quarter note triples at 120 beats per minute.  The other horn line is running through its triples at 122 bpm.  On top of that is an arpeggiated flute line.  The arpeggiated line is coupled to the level of correlation between the two other lines.  Initially the flute part plays more loudly the less-correlated the two horn lines are.  However, that line itself is designed to shift in and out of phase with respect to the correlation metric.  It gets complicated fast.  I have put three different patterns to use in the arepeggiator itself so you should be able to hear that as well. For grins one of the horn lines (the one which also drives the arpeggiator) is cycling back and forth between an i and iv type chord base.  I don't think I've yet listened to the entire thing repeat just yet :)

If you can handle Reich or Glass works of similar technicality you might actually enjoy it.  I've started using this as an element of a bigger piece.

For a more pure and easy to digest example... try 121v120-triplets.mp3.  That is a two line piano version which goes in and out of phase more slowly so it is easier to discern what's going on.  The notes used are  C,E,G in each of the piano lines (one an octave up from the other) but because they shift against each other there are arguably 6 different modes in a whole cycle.

Marching Too

New tune: MarchingToo.mp3 It is a bit of a "march." There's a crescendo at the end so listen all the way through!

This has one of my first attempts at non-trivial drum fills/rhythm change-ups.

A real song would throw on some sort of non-trivial melody and maybe some vocals. But I'm sticking with it being a "march" and calling it a day (weekend+day).

On the Ones sketch

Here's a sketch I came up with while playing around with some "on-the-ones" action: on-the-ones-snap1.mp3

Dancy120

I remixed some more freesound.org samples into a 120 bpm dance jig.

Song here: dancy120-cut3

The samples I used are attributed to: h.quinius (dutty grains.aif)

and ErrorCell (EC-Digi 006.aif EC-Digi 009.aif EC-Digi 016.aif EC-Digi 017.aif

Freesound remix

I've been lurking on Freesound.org for a while now. I like their idea so much I've contributed and have not one but two t-shirts to show for it :). It is a site dedicated to reusable-for-attribution sound samples. I enjoy poking around listening to bits and pieces. I'm weird that way.

To this point I've never used any of the samples. Usually in a search result I start one looping and play others on top. Much like using them in a song... sometimes the result is useful as an inspiration for something else.

Today however I found three samples right in a row that sounded neat superimposed, just by themselves. So I pulled down the samples and did a little tweaking. The result is freesound-remix-1. This reminds me of Amon Tobin. Here's a screen grab of the Logic-work necessary to get this put down: freesound-remix-1-screen.

Freesound is awesome in that it keeps track of the stuff you download so you can attribute really easily. Here are the samples I used:

By f_tts
Untitled01.wav

By dropthedyle
bongox.aif
resclaps.aif

Update: I posted to the Freesound forums to announce this little intro.

ABDF Hierarchical Pattern (Dancemix)

First tune on next album/set. I need to learn how to get off of one phrase and into another or something... abdf-hier-dancemix

Butte songs...

Here are some of the first reasonable sounds generated by "Butte". These are MIDI sequences which I pulled into Logic and created mp3s for. All the notes are auto-generated. I didn't touch them! Sounds neat to me:

Dec2-one-multi-mix.mp3

Dec2-one.mp3

Updated: 12-7-09

swirlybounce.mp3

Updated: 12-8-09

Ok, Ms. Anonymous/Mom: how about this one?

swirlybounce-4mom.mp3 (note this was hand-edited so it isn't really 100% auto-generated any longer :)

Tinsul Pop! Butte

"Butte" is the name of a rendering library I wrote ages ago while in grad school. I never distributed it outside of my own hands... and I probably can't even dig up the old code. If I recall correctly it was a retained-mode graphics API with some stuff like what wound up in VRML. That was back in the day when just getting triangle spans rendered in hardware was a big deal. "Mesa3D" was fairly new back then and "Butte" was a play on that.

"Tinsul" is the name I made up for a WoW character (gnome, warlock of course) my son played. Created from a few syllables I took from LoTR lore it means something like "sparkle wind." That it also sounds like "tinsel" makes it cute to me. Now, long ago when I was making ever more WoW characters for myself I named one "TinsulPop" for what should be almost obvious reasons: Tinsul's pop/dad, get it?

Later I just liked "Tinsul Pop!" so much that I am likely to use it as the nom-de-whatever in any media/software sales I attempt. I have a product/codebase under works which I am declaring will be the "Butte" I never released.

Umber Thanksgiving Tune

Here's a little ditty Bailey and I worked on today. I just started with a few 4/4 beats and started adding in bits. Bailey suggested the Japanese flute part. I called it Umber...

Randrone

One of the staples of truly ambient music is the drone.

For a while now I've been listening to ambient/drone music while I fall asleep. I was curious how a random drone would sound. I fired up Plogue's Bidule and got to hacking.

What I wound up with uses 3 notes (here A, D and F). I feed the frequencies of those three notes into sine wave generators. These sine wave generators each are then modulated by randomly triggered amplitude envelopes.

Because I wanted the ability to "play" some high frequency drones on top of the lower frequency bass line I added an overtone of each of the notes with its own random envelope and mixed these now 6 sound sources together. The performance aspect of this was just me moving sliders around on the mixer to select the random sources. (Bidule v. 0.9685UB file: threenote-sine-drone.bidule)

The result is "Randrone." Enjoy...

This leads me to a thought I had (which I'm sure is not novel)... much of music is hierarchical, whole notes, 1/2 notes, 1/4 notes, etc. At least in the time domain. I wonder if creating notes in a fractal sort of way is noticable?

Fire Op aka Pentatonic Scale Freestyling

This tune came from an quick exercise in freestyling with a pentatonic scale. I'm not good at playing multiple voices on the keyboard. So I captured the D-A bass line sequence then played on top. After a little re-arranging later I added the harp piece. Then the stretched out viola voice and staged in the sound effects tracks. Short and I think sweet.

I realize Fire Op is a pretty simple piece. But it makes me happy that I can arrange something halfway decent sounding.