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A terabyte of harsh noise, stored on 233 DVDs

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

#21

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

bunderbunder wrote: post #10
pervycreeper wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Observations like this are part of what turned me off of "conceptual art"; it's too easy to poke holes in any proposed interpretation, and a defender can just as easily weasel out of it once it's pointed out.

I think that good conceptual art is about the interactions among the idea, the work and its participants as much as anything else. That includes people trying to poke holes in an interpretation, and its defenders trying to weasel out of it. There's nothing wrong with that - at its most stripped down, the purpose of a conceptual work is to just be a conversation piece. Or to put it more succinctly: Oftentimes art's bi…

My conceptual art piece for the day is thinking you're wrong.

And I'm not going to explain, because that would deprive everyone of the opportunity to co-create the work.

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

#22

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

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…

If you're going to author it, why not include just a few quadrillion \x00 characters every so often in a comment field (or whatever the equivalent is for mp3)?

I mean, FLAC proves that people for some reason cherish wasted storage space, especially when that storage space is used for meaningless content that they can't actually hear.

My scheme does that, only bigger.

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

#23

Post by gtani »

I was going to try something similar, something like a MIDIquest 'random parameter' generator running into a few analog/virtual analog synths (MS2k, SY35, mopho, whatever else i see on Craigslist). Probably the most straightforward way to generate "harsh" noise (there's blue and violet noise, emphasizing above 1kHz, according to Brian Shepherd's synthesizer textbook) is to run random parameters into a Yamaha DX7.

_______

reminds me: need to read Vertical Color of Sound: http://www.amazon.com/Brian-Eno-Music-Vertical-Color/dp/0306...

also reminds me: someday I'm going to listen to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music

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

#24

Post by CountSessine »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #4
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…

And if you're making noise for noise sake, MP3 compression would make it less 'noisier'.

Yes - that's sort of what I was wondering.

What effect would the MP3 compression have on the signal's entropy? He says, "MP3 format was chosen not only for its length..." which implies that he managed to compress it at least a bit - if so, there goes his entropy! I can't see how an MP3 compressor could make any headway against a really noisy signal using psycho-acoustic masking, so I'm guessing that any compression he realized came purely from coefficient quantization, which in the case of a really high-entropy signal should actually lower the entropy.

If anyone knows more about this, please feel free to correct me.

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

#25

Post by jewel »

mrb wrote: post #15

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…

> ... I would hate to have to re-burn 233 DVDs...

Burning 233 DVDs is easy if you have the right equipment. At my workplace we used to use units from rimage.com and now use units from microboards.com. The units have built-in inkjet printers so that each disc can have its own label. The software that will let you queue up lots of jobs at once.

(You don't want a disk duplicator, those will typically burn you 10-at-once of the same image.)

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

#26

Post by JTon »

maaku wrote: post #16
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.

If it's lossless, then it'll handle noise the same as the raw wav file. Am I missing something?

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

#27

Post by eru »

JTon wrote: post #26
maaku wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If it's lossless, then it'll handle noise the same as the raw wav file. Am I missing something?

FLAC may take more bits than the wav. (It'll still be lossless.)

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

#29

Post by lultimouomo »

JTon wrote: post #26
maaku wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If it's lossless, then it'll handle noise the same as the raw wav file. Am I missing something?

I'm guessing he meant that FLAC could actually inflate the file size (which is very probable).
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