Sound Installation: CD player on SHUFFLE mode, monitoring, music.

I have composed and recorded 80 minutes of music (and silence) onto a single CD. The sounds are organised into 99 tracks of varying durations. The CD player "shuffles" the tracks at random, creating an ordering that is highly non-repeating.

The behaviour of the installation can be modelled by a four-state automaton, creating textures (states) that move between silence, noise, super-fast pulse and continuous. The machine can also stay within its existing state.

The transition probabilities (chance of moving from one state to another) have been weighted so that machine spends most of its time either in the silent state (idle) or in the pulse state. Incidentally, these four-state machines are similar to models used in DNA sequence analysis (the four "states" correspond to the base pairs A,G,C,T).

The volume level is deliberately low. Are you hearing something? Or is the machine idle?


Jonathan Owen Clark, 14th Oct. 2002.