splintertjes van Eeuwigheid
When it comes to music, there is nothing more extreme than ‘Eeuwigheid’.
These are splintertjes van ‘Eeuwigheid’, slivers of Eternity, a universal music that is strictly short term.
It unfolds along a timeline (theoretically unending, though in our life time always ends), on which the frequencies of randomly occurring uni-phonic and isophonic sound events form a second dimension, bringing life to the steady flow of time.
‘Eeuwigheid’ is unknowable.
However long and often you listen to ‘Eeuwigheid’, there is always only a small hear-wave, about a few seconds wide, that has you surf along, beat upon beat, on to each next tone.
And you always will forget what came before.
You always hear now.
‘Eeuwigheid’ is an instance of a simple generic rule to generate music:
‘make a sound ;
wait some time (it may be zero)’
repeat
I always kept the small scrap of paper, a torn-off corner of a sheet from a notepad, on which I jotted down a version of this ‘algorithm’, on the train from Amsterdam: a sketch for a simple program to try on the PDP 15 computer in one of the studio’s at the Institute of Sonology, the very first time I was allowed as a student to go there unsupervised. That was some day late 1983, on the Plompetorengracht, in the Dutch city of Utrecht.
The sketch went like this:
“Eeuwigheid”
do
speel random sinus toon ;
wacht een random tijdje
herhaal
Clear. I will not have been the first to ponder such a rule.
But that does not detract from its staggering depth.
That first time in Utrecht, I made it sing in FORTRAN.
A little later, when I got my COMMODORE 64, it became a few BASIC lines, poking the machine’s SID chip, on and so on and so on and on.
Later it lived a while as a FLASH animation, and then became this or that other web thing, here and there, now and then.
This Summer of 2024, forty years later, I recalled ‘Eeuwigheid’ and recycled it again, this time in Sonic Pi’s Ruby. It has been sounding in my living room ever since.
But then, of course any thinkable timespan is but a mere sliver’s sliver of ‘Eeuwigheid’‘s eternity.
# eeuwigheid #
loop do
time = Time.new
use_random_seed time.usec
ping = (30..1500).to_a.choose
play hz_to_midi(ping)
sleep 0.225*(1..20).to_a.choose
end
[[ A good forty hours of Eternity appeared in November 2024 on Frans de Waard’s ‘KringloopKassettes’ label: 90 minutes are digitally downloadable on Bandcamp, and the rest took the form of a limited edition series of C90 cassettes, each with their own, unique, slivers of Eternity, in limited edition, hand-stamped and numbered covers (sold out). ]]
{]A Dutch version of this text can be found on the soundblog [}
