Thread by @sqiouyilu

my aunt paid me as much as I make in a week at my dayjob for driving 200 miles today so I am promptly going to blow a good amount of it on MUSIC TO WATCH!!!!!!

it’s absolutely nuts that I can look at the waveform and see the waveforms that are compositing into it

the more I watch the waveforms the more I understand what I’m seeing

having a linguistics major and, at one point, a music minor, is a fucking wild time, the only thing I’m missing is physics, but then again my dad has been teaching me physics since I was young

I love electronic music because literally nothing existed until you turned your brain electricity into sound electricity and now I can use my brain electricity to parse your brainwave visually

so fucking wild. brainwaves turned into soundwaves turned into lightwaves turned into brainwaves. no wonder it’s so important for the vibe to be right

[strobe warning] just WILD to me that I see the bass and treble and percussion in this

oh my god. the fundamental frequency

oh I think I get it now… instead of moving the cursor along a static waveform like audacity, it’s a static window that the waveform moves through

there must be some optimal framerate to zoom ratio that makes the visual and music be perceived together

otherwise the light would reach your brain before the sound and it’s an annoying lips off sync feeling

I NEED A LINGUIST SOUND ENGINEER TO EXPLAIN THIS TO ME!!!!!!!

it’s really easy to see the bass in this one… it’s those longer pulses, the narrower peaks of the vocals get stacked on top of the lower frequency pulse of the bass and the tail ripples out as the waveform loses energy

*grins* no wonder I love this song so much… the more pure tones breaking into fucking obnoxious chinese instruments that are so noisy they scatter the whole thing into falling particles of golden light? yeah, this is what it looks like when anima falls into the Gleaming

songs in this thread by anti-general and howie lee

THE VOICING IN SPEECH *DROP PHONE IN STARTLED RECOGNITION* OMFG THE VOWELS. I CAN SEE THEM

can’t fucking believe all that time in praat measuring voice-onset time after a stop lets me read vowels in here

me: why do people think I have wizard and bard energy

me: *this thread*

me: …ah.

FIXED THE ASPECT RATIO, NOW IT FILLS MY WHOLE SCREEN. fuck YES!!!!!!!!!

I am assuming that what I am watching is the same thing as a guitar string vibrating after being strummed, but for the entire stack of layers of instrumentation and vocals

a bass is probably more obvious. explains why I’m always into the bassist the most

oh but… an oscillating strum… overlapping waves… I mean, we’re all double helices… that’s a vibe

OH

MY GOD

THE ORTHOGONAL PLANE

ORTHOGONAL MEANS 90°

THE WAVEFORM IS ONE
PLANE

THE SPECTROGRAM IS THE SPECTRAL SLICE ALONG THE OTHER PLANE

THE FUCKING

SPECTRAL

SPECTER

PSYCHOPOMP

IS EVERYTHING JUST ONE
LONG EXPLORATION OF THE METAPHYSICS OF VIBES IN MY SECONDARY WORLD??

okay but I’ve been trying to figure out the missing link between music and language in #RazingBabel and how the scifantasy magic of language compression works, and this is putting everything together for me

with #InTheWatchfulCity my Thing was long sensory deprivation baths like what anima does to enter the Gleaming

but I have been puzzled by what the Grotto is for ahosabai

this is the missing thing I needed for #RazingBabel

I can’t watch a single 20-minute episode of TV without checking something else 60 times so the fact that I have been sitting rapt with attention at waveforms on my TV, having to force myself to look away for eye care… wild

*FUMBLES PHONE IN EXCITEMENT*

PEAKS AND VALLEYS

山水

TAOIST GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

https://twitter.com/sqiouyilu/status/1592977444403048448