Every Song
Kyle McDonald
Artist
View code: EverySong / SongIterator
This manner of unfolding is emanation: images emanate from information, and information (in a series of cascading steps) from the infinite. Richly sensuous images gain meaning from the beholder’s awareness of the metadata they encode, as Persian miniature painting indicates mystical significance in its detailed narratives and jewel-like colors.
This is a sketch of a much larger project I'm working on for my MFA thesis. For my MFA thesis I'm generating all the sounds that we, as humans, can differentiate. It's a very long composition :)
Plays every song as quickly as possible, using the 12 chromatic notes.
Though the latter part of chapter 9 is devoted to the immersive quality of sensuous figuration, it seemed appropriate to turn, after these often visually dazzling displays, to the expression of that which entices at its surface but leads the mind steadily to the “metadata,” the layers and layers through which the infinite arrives at the image: in this case, all possible combinations of the chromatic notes, systematically searched through. The sound is immersive and steady, saturated with dense regular arrays of notes, with the count ticking in the lower right-hand corner a reminder of the system behind the strange, gradual ostinato, and the system behind that system, and still further to the space of every note in relation to every other note, which we can see through their sequential display as though peering at the night sky through a keyhole.
“If there is anywhere that new media can invoke the sublime, it is in the perceptual response to rhythms that the body has never before encountered: disjointed rhythms arising from the conflict between bodily and informational time.” (p. 287)
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