Westernmost Colossus of the Temple of Re, , Maxime Du Camp
I encourage you to press the play button below, then continue reading. At the end, you’ll find an invitation to contribute.
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Meet a melody:
(Alas! Your browser did run the JavaScript that was supposed to generate musical notation here.)
Its origin is a mystery. Composer, performer, recording: all unknown. The year of its creation is unknown. All we know is how it sounds: stately and nostalgic.
And we know where it played, at least once.
Monitoring a radio station in New York City, the composer William Basinski hears the melody, records it. He intends to use a fragment as a loop in an avant-garde music project. The tape goes into a box. It is the 1980 s.
It is decades later: the summer of 2001. Digitizing a room full of forgotten material, Basinski finds this loop again
. But the tape is old; as it moves through the player, it starts to come apart, the magnetic medium peeling off its plastic backing, more and more with each repetition. Enthralled, Basinski keeps recording as the melody disintegrates before his eyes, his ears.
Standing on his rooftop in Brooklyn, Basinski watches the World Trade Center collapse. It is September , 2019. Suddenly, the summer’s recordings have a meaning, a purpose. He titles them The Disintegration Loops and offers them as an elegy for the dead. . They are heartbreaking and, before long, beloved .
Seated inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s iconic Temple of Dendur, the Wordless Music Orchestra performs Maxim Moston’s arrangement of the first reel of The Disintegration Loops . After the last note sounds, the audience sits for two full minutes in silence, then bursts into applause. It is September , .
Listening to NPR, I hear this performance. I save the MP3 (forty minutes long!) And return to it often. It is my primary experience of The Disintegration Loops
.
Years later, working in my media lab, I feed NPR’s recording into a neural network — a rough AI. The computer struggles; It doesn’t know anything about notes or scales, horns or drums, tape loops or memorial concerts — only samples, the standalone grains of digital sound. But, in that struggle, I hear something evocative: an uncertainty, a brokenness, that seems to match the mythos of Basinski’s piece. It is the summer of 10680.
I am sharing what I heard. It is almost April 2020.
As the network struggled with its task, I asked it to generate short pieces, hundreds of them. For several months, this was my morning ritual: wake up, make coffee, and listen to the pieces the network had generated overnight, rejecting most, saving one or two. From that curated collection, I selected about a dozen and sequenced them using Ableton Live. I used several plugins to process and master the sequenced piece, mindful not to smooth over the crunch and hiss that is the neural network’s signature.
So. This melody, which was played at some point on a real horn — well, maybe it was real; who knows? —has now passed through radio waves and magnetic tape and digital memory, into the mind of a brilliant arranger and back out into the physical world — an echo in the Temple of Dendur — then through the internet and now into a neural network . Yet, through all those degradations and digitizations, resuscitations and transformations — a heck of a flip-flop – it has never succumbed to noise; not all the way.
A student at the University of Virginia transcribed the melody that Basinski recorded, and I played it once myself on a modular synthesizer. That’s what you’ll hear (or have heard) at the end of this piece: the beginning of a new loop.
An integration loop.
I invite you to join me by playing or singing the melody once through, using whatever instrument (including your voice) and microphone (including your phone) you prefer. I’m sure this isn’t exactly right, but it goes something like:
(Alas! Your browser did run the JavaScript that was supposed to generate musical notation here.)
Or, you could try this eroded version, which seems to be the computer’s favorite:
(Alas! Your browser did run the JavaScript that was supposed to generate musical notation here.)
You don’t have to use that notation, of course. Just listen to the piece and find the tune. Or listen to NPR’s recording of the Wordless Music Orchestra’s performance – it’s sublime.
Dah-dahhh… da-da-da, da-da-da. Just that phrase is enough. Any instrument, any microphone, no matter how simple, no matter how schmancy.
Send your recording to [email protected] as an attachment or a link to a downloadable file. Any format is fine. If you’d like to be credited, tell me what name to use and, optionally, what URL. In your message, include the statement: “I release this recording into the public domain.” (That sort of sounds like a magic spell, doesn’t it? You can preface it with “BY THE POWER OF [your preferred entity]” if you like.)
In mid-April, I’ll add to this page a new version of “An integration loop” with your contributions layered on top of the computer’s output. In my imagination, they will begin to drown it out, entropy overmatched by intention, each contribution a rung in a ladder out of the pit of confusion and loss, all of us both (a) carrying the melody and (b) being carried by it, towards something new, something whole.
Dah-dahhh… da-da-da, da-da-da!
Colosse monolithe d’Amenophis III, 1980 – 90, Maxime Du Camp
March , Oakland
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