Notes on Six Degrees by Alex Young

7econds Microsound List Project

To begin with, I asked myself what importance the number seven has, and
why imposing a limit on a song length may be important.  The first thing
that came to my mind was the 7 +/- 2 rule that I learned when studying 
Human Computer Interaction at university.  Humans apparently work best
with between 5 and 9 objects at one time.  Mathematically, seven is the
fourth-smallest prime number, and seven divided by 999,999 gives 142,857.
Fractions with 7 in the denominator have this series of digits repeating
in decimal:  1/7 = 1/7=0.142857142.

On December 3rd, 2003, I wrote notes on time.  How small can a length of
time be?  Logically, a length of time can be derived from distance 
divided by speed.  If the fastest speed attainable is the speed of light,
and the smallest distance Planck's length, then the smallest measurable
moment of time is Planck's length divided by the speed of light.  This is
known as Planck's time.

Theoretically, these rules apply to the universe, but some quantisation
occurs when working with digital sound.  It's common to find digital
audio encoded at 44.1khz, which is 44,100hz.  One Hertz has a period of 
one second, so audio encoded at 44.1khz has 44,100 cycles per second.
The sample size of digital audio is commonly 16-bit, where the values 
are encoded as 2's-complement signed integers, ranging from -32768 to 
32767.   This means there is a choice of 65536 values 44,100 times a
second.

By 11th December, several projects had been uploaded to the microsound
hotline server, and I found that I liked the ones that could be looped.  
Short looped pieces of music with sufficiently complex content remind me
of sculptures.  Eventually the loop becomes hypnotic, and as you start 
to notice different things in the layers of the piece it becomes 
somewhat like an optical illusion.  In addition, as your perception
shifts across the sound, it begins to feel like it's part of something
greater.

On the 12th December 2003, I began to generate sound from fractals.  The
reasoning behind this was that fractals exhibit self similarity.  You 
can take a sample of data from a set such as Mandelbrot's set and produce
images or audio.  A simple equation gives you a clue to an infinite 
realm.

I wrote two programs in Python to explore this direction.  The first
generated waveforms from data generated by Mandelbrot's set, and the
second created a midi file.

Taking seven seconds of data from an infinite supply was attractive, 
because despite my piece being short it could potentially last for ever.
Despite this, I felt uninspired by this line of research perhaps because 
I often attempt to use mathematics in my audio projects.  It suddenly 
occurred to me that I could take a much more social approach to this 
project, an unusual direction for me.

On the 17th December, 2003, I realised that social relationships are
exactly like fractals.  Apparently, there are six degrees of separation
between everyone in society.  This means that we all know each other 
through six people.  It's a cliche, but an entertaining idea.  I could
combine my idea of creating a short piece of music that was part of
something  much larger with my desire to temporarily abandon mathematics.

I contacted six of my friends that I knew were musicians, and asked them
if I could use recordings of them performing to use for a project.  They
were all kind enough to donate tapes and CDs for my short piece of music.

The sounds the listener is introduced to are arbitrary, and they may or
may not identify with particular sounds from each of the source samples.
Hopefully the source samples and my composition and arrangement skills
should contain enough unique fingerprints to provide a large continuum 
for exploration on the listener's behalf.