The Code
A new album created from code
I am delighted to share with you the release of my new album The Code. You can listen to the music on Bandcamp (and other platforms soon) and read the liner notes below. Since the inspiration for this album was sparked by a Substack post, I would like to share here a bit more about the process of its creation.
(if you are reading this in email, click the title of this piece to go to Substack and hear the music)
Album’s liner notes
The Code explores the landscape of a sound world generated from a simple and custom algorithm. The music is the sum of hundreds of elemental sine waves — the simplest sound possible that only a machine can produce. Intentionally escapist, it evokes the exoticism of deep space and its unknown worlds, with the music travelling through ‘spaces’ of differing note densities and durations.
The music is tuned to the harmonic series, dating back to Ancient Greece and the philosopher Pythagoras. This tuning allows for the coexistence of hundreds or even thousands of tones — blurring the distinctions between notes, chords, and timbres.
The algorithm used to create the music is also used to generate the album’s artwork, providing insight into the form and structure of the music.
The Code celebrates human agency and dignity, treating the personal computer as a tool for artistic freedom and liberty, in contrast to a world increasingly shaped by distant supercomputers. It seeks to embody a fundamental human yearning — to search for the garden in the machine.
Discovering Quasar
A quasar, trillions of times brighter than the sun, emits radiation from an accretion disc light years in diameter.
Moons RisingMoons rising in the long night of a distant world.
Passing Star
A passing star whose awesome power exerts transformative forces on its neighbours.
Ancient LightLight as memory, billions of years old, revealing the secrets of deep space and time.
Unknown NebulaAn iridescent cloud of interstellar dust grains thrown out from a dying star, floating in the darkness of outer space.
Notes for Substack
I had no plan to write an electronic album this time last year. Not for the coming year, nor the rest of my life. I had sold all my electronic equipment long ago. All that remained was a laptop, a pair of headphones, and the open-source music program Supercollider. Hardly the envy of a serious electronic musician!
Yet despite having let go of electronic music, it did not let go of me, returning when I unearthed an enigmatic image that had been lingering on my hard disk (and the back of my mind) for some time. It was an image that would set me off on a new musical path; one that required machines to turn what I had seen into sound.
In May last year, I wrote a post called have you ever wondered what rhythm looks like? It showed various images of massive polyrhythms, unplayable by humans, but nevertheless interesting to look at. To sonify the images I created a small 7-line program that generated some basic sounds. Once completed, I played around with the program, and in doing so unexpectedly stumbled upon a much greater potential in it. With my curiosity ignited, in the following weeks and months I calibrated and tweaked the algorithm, exploring and immersing myself in its soundscapes. I felt the distinct feeling of being transported elsewhere — to a place I wanted to spend more time in.
The music’s architecture was informed by complexity theory and emergence. A theory in which the interaction of independent elements in a system can create complex structures and behaviours. This helps describe how the infinitesimal can give birth to larger structures of intricacy and elegance, such as the universe, the web of life, forests, civilisations, human beings, machines and code.
While working on this a major cultural shift was underway with the arrival of new machine learning (or AI) technologies. I felt then, as I do now, that this technology was — in large part — built with exploitative, dehumanising, and imperialistic intentions. Without seeking artists’ permission, it used supercomputers to extract artefacts from vast sets of ‘cultural data’, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of colonial looting.
While the future is deeply uncertain, it seems that two broad scenarios are foreseeable: one where a narrow group of people use technology to define and shape the world, and another where a far greater and more diverse group of people define and shape technology. In this project, I have sought to do the latter — to search for beauty in code and the garden in the machine.
Listen to the album on Bandcamp
It was a pleasure to give "The Code" a first listen (on speakers).
The whole album seemed shorter than real time. But it was not easy on my (bad) memory !
I remember clearly the "radiance" of Discovering Quasar and other passages afterwards. Also the surprising end chord.
Will be listening with headphones next time.
This is really intense. I listened to it in the afternoon because I'm afraid to listen to it in the dark 😉
Won't be the only listen though, have to check it out more, there's a lot of layers. Unknown Nebula is the fave so far, I like the different sections.