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A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

jliat.com

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Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#11

Post by dmcginty »

Aardwolf wrote: post #5
fuzzywalrus wrote: post #3

A rather John Cage-ian anti-music piece although the only thing of interest but the way it was written I wasn't sure if the 4 GB limit "discovered" FAT32's limit or if it was a MP3 format issue that players simply couldn't handle files larger than 4 GB because they were 32 bit. Other than that, I can't really say that creating a project of 700 days of generated noise is very interesting from an art perspective, but I…

It could become even more art if it included a performance of playing this for 711 days, with someone changing the DVD to the next one every 3 days.

There's a John Cage piece called "Organ^2/As Slow As Possible" that is currently being performed on a specially-made pipe organ in Germany. Note changes happen every few years and the piece will finish in 2640.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible

Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#12

Post by quarterto »

dmcginty wrote: post #11
Aardwolf wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could become even more art if it included a performance of playing this for 711 days, with someone changing the DVD to the next one every 3 days.

There's a John Cage piece called "Organ^2/As Slow As Possible" that is currently being performed on a specially-made pipe organ in Germany. Note changes happen every few years and the piece will finish in 2640. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible

Also Longplayer[1], played on singing bowls, which will end at midnight on the 31st of December, 2999. It's written to constantly evolve and never repeat. You can stream it!

http://longplayer.org/

Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#15

Post by mrb »

Oops, the artist's source code has a bug making the 233 DVDs contain not what he thinks they contain... All his source files [1][2][3] attempt to generate the random noise with:

  // basically no wimpy numbers - only fat ones
  if (s > 0 & s  -30000) {s = (short) (s - 30000);}
s is a Java 16-bit signed short initialized to a random value. His intent is apparently to modify s to generate sound samples in the ranges [-32768,-30000] and [30000,32767] to make the noise "harsh" (no samples close to 0). But because shorts wrap around the boundaries -32768 and 32767, most samples will in fact be in the range [5537,32767]. See for yourself: if s=5537, he adds 30000, s wraps to -29999, he subtracts 30000, s wraps again back to 5537. s will end up in the ranges [-32768,-30000], [0] and [5537,32767], making the noise less harsh than it should have been.

Damn I would hate to have to re-burn 233 DVDs, or this set of 510(!) he produced later: http://www.jliat.com/HNW510/index.html

This type of bug, an integer overflow, is one of the many types of bugs I look for when I review source code as part of my job in info sec.

[1] http://jliat.com/HNW/HNW.java

[2] http://jliat.com/HNW/HNW90.java

[3] http://jliat.com/HNW/hnwfile.java

Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#16

Post by maaku »

terminado wrote: post #2

If you're going to master an original work in a digital format, and it's going to be a terabyte of anything, why MP3 and not FLAC? Figure at a bitrate of 128 kbps, and a sample rate of 44.1 Khz, an MP3 1 million bytes in size usually clocks in at close to 1 minute of playback. With those statistics in mind, a ballpark figure of 2 years of noise is a reasonable estimate, and that's pretty close to the 711.5 days they…

Um, lossless compression (FLAC) is not going to handle random noise very well. You're probably better off with the raw WAV file.

Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#17

Post by S_A_P »

The Roland MS-1, I remember wanting one of these but having to settle for a second hand Roland S-330.(which I was actually glad to have done) The MS-1 is a quirky sampler- has a simple interface and IIRC is battery operated. It did some data compression internally to bump up the sample time and stored the samples in flash memory. This is not really a "hi-fi" sampler, and depending on what settings were used, I would argue that its characteristics would smooth out harshness rather than enhance them. I think you could get around a minute of sample time if it was set to its lowest sample rate. Not bad for the 90s...

Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#18

Post by infinity »

In a far distant future an interstellar scientific exploration vessel will approach the lifeless remains of the solar system and discover, stashed away in a big artificial moon, one very huge data archive consisting entirely of harsh noise. They will be so happy.

Re: A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

#20

Post by Spooky23 »

terminado wrote: post #2

If you're going to master an original work in a digital format, and it's going to be a terabyte of anything, why MP3 and not FLAC? Figure at a bitrate of 128 kbps, and a sample rate of 44.1 Khz, an MP3 1 million bytes in size usually clocks in at close to 1 minute of playback. With those statistics in mind, a ballpark figure of 2 years of noise is a reasonable estimate, and that's pretty close to the 711.5 days they…

For the true audiophile looking to appreciate the noise in the exact manner that the artist intended, the distortions introduced into the harmonic balance by MP3 make for a completely different and less organic experience.
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