Story Behind the Song
**********************
Composing "Fractaural"
by Matthew Ross Davis
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Numbers
=======
The five so-called "Pythagorean Solids" are also called the "perfect" solids
because they each consist of a specific number of equilateral sides:
the icosahedron contains 20 triangles, the dodecahedron 12 pentagons, the
octahedron 8 triangles, the hexahedron 6 squares, and the tetrahedron 4
triangles. These solids have a seemingly endless number of inter-related
mathematical properties and, like the golden ratio and pi, are found
everywhere in nature.
I've used these mathematical properties in many of my compositions, and here
utilize the number of sides for each solid by combining them into a ratio,
20:12:8:6:4 (which reduces further to 5:3:2:1.5:1).
Sampling
========
The original text is 233 seconds long. By using the even number of 200 seconds,
I was able to pinpoint samples by doubling the original ratio and mirroring it
(40:24:16:12:8:8:12:16:24:40) and then sectioning 200 accordingly. This gives
sample points of 40", 64", 80", 92", 100", 108", 120", 136", 160" and 200". A
decision was made to sample 5", 4", 3", 2", 1", 1", 2", 3", 4" and 5" from
each point, respectively. Then, a -75dB peak threshold was used to break down
the samples to emphasize the rythmic patterns of the speech pattern contained
therein.
The idea here was to create a sort of Shenkerian 'fractalization' of the
samples (Shenker was a music theorist who broke down music into different
structural levels - foreground, middleground, background, etc. - it applies
primarilly to traditional harmony, but as a general concept is useful for
definitions of those levels). The 'middleground' fractalization is the
original (i.e. the spoken text). The 'foreground' and 'background' are
derivatives of that text, based on the samples taken from it.
Background and Foreground samples
=================================
The background was very simply created by time stretching the samples to fit
the duration of the original text. The foreground creation was more complex,
taking each sample and timestretching each into smaller and smaller samples by
using the original ratio (now in an inverted and simplified form, 1:1.5:2:3:5)
to guide the amount of each timestretching. For example, a sample with a length
of 4" gets compressed into samples of 2.67", 2", 1.33" and 0.8".
These foreground samples were concatenated, and the decision was made to use
only the final second or two from each. These 'remainder' samples were then
timestretched to be either 1.5" or 3", depending on which value was closer to
the original.
Arranging the background was as easy as layering the timestretched samples
directly underneath the middleground. The arrangement of the foreground samples,
however, follows the same proportions as the original sampling. As such, a
change in texture within the foreground coincides with the point in the text
from which that new sample (texture) is derived.
Cognitive Completion
====================
The remainder of the work rested with the matching of what had been laid down
sonically with these different layers and what was going on with the text.
Queues were taken from the subject matter and emotional context of the speech
to guide the fades and panning of each layer. This process both obfuscates the
fractal structure (hiding its true nature, making it overreaching but strangely
unperceivable) and emphasizes the cognitive one (what we empirically gain from
hearing and understanding the text as accompanied by sound).
Lyrics
It’s hard to document the losing of one’s wits. I mean, god, you’d think I
would do my best to forget about the whole thing and move on to doing
something more productive like watching television or being a good consumer.
But it is bad medicine to keep it all inside. The fan was loud, and I
started focusing on its noise in relation to the noise of the room, and the
world around it. The first time I heard an aural fractal was while listening
to one of my least favorite songs, Closer, by Nine Inch Nails. I never liked
that Trent Reznor tart, and this didn't help. It was an angry fractal made
by reducing the pitch and timestretching the beat and movement of the music,
hence creating the aural illusion of travelling down a spiral at fast
speeds. It just basically made me angry, and I wasn’t sure what I was
feeling because I was too busy hating the song and begging my friend, Seth,
to change the music. “What do you want to hear?” He asked, and I responded
in my most macho of frightened child voices, “Anything mellow, how about
that acid-jazz compilation?” Reluctantly he changed the music, obviously
seeing it bothered me so much so that I would leave the room if it continued
playing. The second time I experienced this feeling was listening to Beastie
Boys’ Cookiepuss (with Bonus Blotter, Beastie Revolution, and the censored
version) for the first time. What we’re talking about is approximately
fifteen to twenty minutes of the finest dust music ever to come out of
Brooklyn. There was this one part where they slow down the tape mid-sentence
as this one guy says, “my sister’s name is…” and it gets all garbled, and
“my mother’s name is…” and it gets all garbled again. That just really
fucked me up. I was sure the song stopped and I was just hearing the
bassline in my head, and when people talked to me the ends of their
sentences were getting garbled just like the song. Pretty soon everything I
heard, saw, and touched was garbled. The second to last, and by far the
worst, aural fractal came from the fan (the last fractal was produced while
playing table tennis, I just lost myself in the sound of the ball going back
and forth). Just listening to the fan, becoming it, focusing on it. The more
attention I paid to the fan, the less things happened around me. I would
look around and everything but the fan began to move slower. Colors began to
turn basic pastels, but the fan would be the same. All other sound but the
fan’s became slow and quiet, like pushing the power button off on a record
player mid-song. The pastels were reduced to an even more basic black and
white, and then just black, silence, and the fan. Me and the fan. The fan.
It was slowing down now too, the blades moving slower like action sequences
in the movies, the sound, again, lower pitch, slower spins, lower, slower,
low, slow… and then, nothing. Just me. No time. I was sure I’d be stuck
there forever. The things I was thinking about were amazing, I mean I knew
everything about everything. There was no one to explain it to, so I didn’t
need to reduce it to a communicable form. Just pure thought. Pure knowledge.
Complete and utter self awareness. It felt terrible. It was like everything
in my head moved so fast that the rest of the world was moving too slowly to
catch up with it, and eventually I traveled faster than light so everything
was dark. There was nobody else. No thing else. I wondered what was going on
outside my mind, because I was sure I was trapped inside it, but all I could
come up with is that I either died or went into a coma. The last thing I
remember before inhaling was a cool breeze against my left arm. I inhaled,
and as I did, it was as if everything immediately sped up to a normal pace
again. I opened my eyes. I was lying face down in the blue wool blanket
covering the bed I was sitting on. I sat up and looked around me. Everything
was normal. I’ve spent my time since trying to explain what I thought of in
words. Most of the things I experienced were a lot of “it” as a noun’s. But
I found the best way to relay them… undertone. Subtle undertone.
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