Hi everyone! I’m releasing my first full length album today!
The concept of the album is based on the Shannon–Weaver model of signal vs noise. I wanted to remove the signal and focus on noise, because of my struggle with information overload in the last year. I made it with the Serge synthesizer whilst compressing those musical gestures into extreme low fidelity MP3 formats countless times using some custom scripts. In the end I removed the original signal from the recording leaving only the compression artefacts, a ghostly sound. Perfect as background sound to fill your room with at low volume. It’s more than 3 hours long and weighs only 29MB.
Obviously inspired by Éliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Lucier.
Excited to finally share my music with this community, so here are some bandcamp codes. Enjoy!
Thanks for sharing. I used ju8m-v3ut.
It is a cool idea and concept and hits the Zeitgeist. I am just four minutes in, listening to it on a laptop in a room on a noisy street while one of our cats is cleaning herself loudly…it still seems to work… I love exploring the digital abyss of files myself, some weird things seem to hang around in the corners.
Thanks so much! This is beautiful(i also love how the digital ecosystem works altogether: sounds different on small laptop or iphone speakers than on something nicer, and they all play so well together… even listening on different devices all at once). Nice work!
Cool!!! You and others might be interested in Jonathan Sterne’s work in the format, e.g his book MP3. The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press, 2012) and an article The mp3 as cultural
artifact (new media & society 8(5), 2013) and I’m sure i have also heard his works of subtracting the compressed MP3 from a wav, robert with an interview, on a podcast, maybe it was on this 2012 episode of CBC’s Spark titled "The Signal of Noise.
Really looking forward to giving it a listen today at night! And such a lovely idea to employ negative space in music Out of curiosity how would the diff algorithm work for two audio files. Just going sample by sample and doing subtraction or XOR?
EDIT: and now I am stuck wondering at which format I should download it Should I listen to it in loseless format or should I go deeper down the rabbit hole and choose lossy compression
Hey Karol! Thanks, negative space is an excellent analogy! Negating is done through phase cancellation. Bandcamp will only generate a downsample of my upsampled version. The actual mp3s are attached in the zip archive. I had a hard time finding a way to get these low fidelity files published, Bandcamp doesn’t allow mp3 uploads. I’m not even going to try the streaming platforms.
Thanks! I love playing it on different devices too! Especially low volume on my smartphone, left somewhere in the room. Try headphones too, a whole other experience!
Thanks Andrew! There’s more scheduled later this year, this is the first in a series exploring different things information theory. Not ready to publish the scripts yet!
Thanks, John! No post edits, not even proper mastering. I recorded these a year ago and been living with them while waiting for the headspace to properly edit/clean them. In the end I decided that would’ve not been in line with concept. The three tracks have been made with different methods and on one I’ve interleaved iterations with a hint reverb, but very little processing otherwise.
Ya, really enjoyed that book and also love his book The Audible Past. I describe that one as a history of transmitted sound, starting with the stethoscope. Saw him speak years ago at CMU and he was absolutely fascinating. @lijnenspel , looking forward to checking this in my new space or apartment.
Should I listen to it in loseless format or should I go deeper down the rabbit hole and choose lossy compression