My Neverending Digital Sound Legacy

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I made this video in 1981 on a 16K TRS-80 Color Computer. The program has only 26 bytes of code yet I don't know how long it can do what it does without repeating. One thing is for sure: None of you have a computer that can store the whole video before it repeats. It may have 80 googols of frames! It may have over a googolplex of audio "samples"! I don't know, but I remember leaving this running for days just to see what it will look and sound like. Sorry it's blurry, it is from an old VHS tape and only about 2 minutes of it I think.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMbeXafgcTk[/youtube]

Sometime later I wondered what the digital sound of counting would be. It is obvious to me if you count from all 0's to all 1's in the memory then you would hear all the possible sounds. And this would be what it sounded like if you speeded it up to only 8 minutes. If you listened to this at a reasonable speed, it would take more than a lifetime and you would hear every possible sound or song many many times!


THE SOUND OF COUNTING FROM ALL 0's TO ALL 1's

This next one I did very recently with a weird machine that I made. It is like the first one but different. These are all fractals and I output the same numbers from the fractals to the screen and the speakers at the same time. This is a logical audio-visual-number synaesthesia phenomenon. It is also, for reasons I don't understand, impossible to do in Windows (because I consulted so many professional Windows programmers to recode my code and though it was all less than a screenful, none of it was ever translated).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh9EglZJvZs[/youtube]

All of these make graphics and sound that can go on "forever". Well, not actually. I've determined that there is certainly a finite number of 4-minute sounds, and it is less than (2 to the power of (2 to the 32nd power)). I made the first video BEFORE anyone even had a CD player! It is certainly my goal to define the set of all possible music mathematically, which I certainly succeeded in the case of the MATH behind the "all 0's to all 1's count" sound.

Anyway, I have hundreds of programs like this which produce graphics and sounds in all kinds of order because I am exploring my logical-audio-visual-math synaesthesia.

If you understand what I am talking about and why I do this then you might be angry.
I don't think anyone understands what I'm doing or why.

But I want to ask you what you think or feel about the results, even weird thoughts.
Like, what do you hear in these sounds?
Do you see anything interesting?
Is it musical or totally just awful noise?
Think of it as a Rorshach test, if you don't mind.

Another ...extraterrestrial?... one.


CLICK HERE TO *HEAR* THAT FRACTAL!

It is both interesting and musical in the vein of early 80's Industrial Music and current 'Dark Ambient' music. --It reminds me of early Whitehouse or Lustmord.

Just... WOW. I love that. Absolutely love it. Do you ever plan on making any proper sound recordings out of that? Those are just the sort of crazy, glitchy. beautiful noises that I adore!

I find these truly fascinating! I could watch and listen to the first one for a long time - I wish the video was longer. That one and the counting one are very hypnotic to me. This kind of work intrigues me a lot as I'm very interested in generative, algorithmic sound and graphics.

Do you by any chance still have the program in some form for the first one? I would love to see and hear it in real-time. I'm not very familiar with the TRS-80 series of computers but maybe there are emulators out there for Windows that could run this.

Anyway thanks very much for sharing these - I really enjoy this sort of thing.