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Celebrating 200 episodes of Purified Radio Nora En Pure takes the listeners to the stunning mountain scenery of Gstaad, Switzerland for a unique combination of her characteristic music and raw nature.
This video is part of the Emergence audio/visual project, where I explored the idea of natural laws and their creation of the world around us. The early chapters of the story focus on the fundamentals of natural laws themselves, the basic principles of nature which needed to be in place before the physical universe could come into being.
Luckily for me, working on an AV project, these basic building blocks of nature tended to yield beautiful results visually — symmetries, the distribution of the primes, dimensionality and hyper-dimensional forms, and here, waves. Perhaps this is because we have some subconscious appreciation for their importance, or maybe it’s just through social conditioning and the fact that they are usually common forms because of their irreducibility.
The idea seemed like a simple one visually, so I wanted to create a simple classic synth approach musically, and find a strong retro aesthetic visually to match. Tom Hodge added some Fender Rhodes noodling for extra retro feel, and Kevin McGloughlin nailed the visual approach with a great technique for presenting waves as the product of strong moving lines in a simple colour scheme. Some of the video work reminds me of 60’s or 70’s modernist imagery, which fit right in musically.
I chose the concept of waves for part of the Emergence story, because they are a very important idea in much of our understanding of the world around us, and within us. They form the basis of light and wireless communications, and our source of energy from the sun which creates almost all plant and animal life. Our best understanding of the fundamental nature of reality at the smallest scales is purely waves, apparently. And even the process of neuronal action that produces our awareness relies on waves of charge flow created by forces which are supposedly themselves mediated by waves — the virtual photon, a massless wave (i.e. light), being the force carrier of the electromagnetic charge which shunts particles around inside your neurones to make you think. And then there’s the more familiar waves that can dump you under and make you swallow some rank sea water.
In addition to all of that, waves are also the basis of music — waves in the air, that is, sound, structured with symmetries. Much the same as with thinking about symmetry for that chapter of the Emergence story, it turns out that music shares a lot in common with our visual aesthetic preferences, and both are deeply rooted in principles of nature illuminated by science.
There are different ways in which waves can operate, and what constitutes a wave at all, with or without a medium for example. But they all seem to involve energy transfer without needing the transfer of physical mass — like you can see in the video, the mass (each particle, or a charge) moves up and down on a single axis, and the wave, and energy, is propagated through the medium by these point oscillations.
— Max
‘Volga / Bengali’ sees Anjunadeep newcomer Bona Fide team up with Anjunadeep Explorations 08 alumni M.O.S. for a double cut of exotic deep house.
A commanding pair of singles, ‘Volga’ combines ethnic plucks with a luscious arrangement of strings, whilst ‘Bengali’ lays chorused vocals across a bed of tribal percussion and all-enveloping bass.
Max Cooper:
For the «Yearning for the Infinite» project I looked for different ways of visualising the infinite, interspersed between imagery of humans in endless pursuit. For one chapter I wanted to visualise the digits of a transcendental number, thought to be endless and non-repeating. Martin Krzywinski specialises in visualising these digits amongst many other things, and one of my favourite images is his tree map of pi, which presents this endless nested chaos in beautiful visual form. I wanted to map that growing randomness and chaotic detailed structural form to the piece of music, so I collaborated with the great music software developer, Alexander Randon on a special tool which allows the construction of musical fractals and many other complex melodic forms. With this tool I started the piece with a simple melodic structure, which is iteratively broken down into more and more complex melodies as the tree map breaks down the initially simple first digit into more and more complex sub-structures. With the aesthetic as a whole becoming this sea of interacting notes, partly random, but with a global form emerging eventually, as the circle is embodied by the chaos of the digits of pi.
Nick Cobby collaborated with Martin to bring this idea to life in animated form for the visual show, with a hyper-detailed tree map structure growing all around the audience. And if youre interested in the ideas behind this I delved into this chapter in some detail in a recent blog essay here (which also comes as a poster with Martins tree map image inside the album vinyl package): maxcooper.net/transcendental-tree-map
Martin Krzywinski:
The transcendental tree map encodes the first 20,244 digits of Pi = 3.1415...7012.
The construction of the map begins with dividing the canvas with 3 vertical lines, which forms 4 rectangles. Each of the four rectangles formed by this process is divided with 1, 4, 1 and 5 horizontal lines, respectively. This forms 2 5 2 6 = 15 rectangles. Each of the 15 rectangles is divided by vertical lines according to the next 15 digits of Pi. This process repeats until we have performed the loop 7 times.
The division of each rectangle is not even—the positions of the lines are slightly jittered. This gives the map a more organic feel.
The number of digits encoded in each loop is 1, 4, 15, 98, 548, 2,962 and 17,180. In total, 17,180 vertical and 3,064 horizontal lines are drawn and these form the backbone of the map.
The video is created by layering numerous animations of the construction of the map, in which the rate and order of line growth is varied. Blinking rectangles indicate that the lines for a digit have completed drawing.
Original tree map and animation clips by Martin Krzywinski.
Compositing, coloring, synchronization and other post-processing by Nick Cobby.
Nick Cobby:
The challenge with Transcendental Tree Map was to bring to life Martin Krzywinskis amazing scientific visualisations of Pi. They are so dense and complex, that a considered approach was needed to ensure the computer systems could handle all the information and still maintain clarity. We had a twofold approach, using automated coded sequences from Martin and then manual digital manipulation and editing from me. Using both a generative and manual approach parallels the juxtaposition of order and randomness inherent in Martins work, and the hypnotic music Max created.
Although all Martins sequence outcomes are different, they all start with the principle rule of Pi, and when placed on top of each other, they all occupy the same grid space allowing layering and using some of the sequences as alpha channels to reveal others underneath. At any one time there are up to 30 sequences running at once. At times I wanted it to look more organic, with line tracers drawing like roots of a tree, or holes appearing in the data then glitching back to its organised structure, like its constantly battling itself. When the visual is at its peak, the construction and destruction of the order of the tree map is constant, and the notion of the infinity is revealed through the endless visual possibilities.
The transcendental tree map was originally created for 2015 Pi Day (http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/pi/piday2015/posters.mhtml) by Martin Krzywinski (http://mkweb.bcsgc.ca) (@MKrzywinski), who has been creating Pi Day art (http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/pi/piday.mhtml) since 2013. Martin is a staff scientist at Michael Smiths Genome Sciences Centre at BC Cancer (http://www.bcgsc.ca) where he works on data visualization.