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In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

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"Topic of my master's thesis, how did you know? It's all ancient<br />

history since I dropped out of school."<br />

"And 20th century stochastic music? How does that fit into<br />

your music of the spheres?"<br />

"Stochastic is a term used <strong>by</strong> my last teacher Iannis Xenakis. It<br />

means 'stretching irresistibly towards a goal' and is characterized <strong>by</strong><br />

masses, clouds, galaxies of sounds too vast for the behavior of<br />

individual elements to be determined, more like an environment in<br />

which the, uhm, 'spheres' can exist. Designing clouds and streams of<br />

sonic events is what I do."<br />

"Hmm. Sonic events, right. The Extra Low Frequencies you<br />

mention on your website. The military have been experimenting with<br />

these for the purpose of crowd and personality control for a while now.<br />

Isn't that risky?"<br />

Penny was ready for this. Or was she? "Oh, you mean like The<br />

Psycho-physiological Effects Of Subharmonic Sound Within The<br />

E.L.F. Range <strong>In</strong> Computer Generated Music Through the Use Of<br />

Directed Standing Waves? My area of research at school, I devised a set<br />

of subharmonic gestures for triggering a desired emotional response in<br />

an audience implementing a simple artificial intelligence program which<br />

allowed me to evoke <strong>com</strong>plex emotions using sounds derived from just<br />

tunings and overtones."<br />

She had to get her off this track. "This Viennese scholar I<br />

started corresponding with several years before discovered a system of<br />

measuring essentic form, the shapes that emotional expressions create,<br />

and their use, especially in music and I began implementing it. This guy<br />

—neuroscientist, inventor, concert pianist, conductor - you name it,<br />

built this <strong>com</strong>puter program to simulate an orchestra, well, he coined<br />

the term cyborg, so he invented this―"<br />

"Orchestra of AI robots? You mean with actual virtual<br />

players?"<br />

"Pretty much."<br />

"Hollow out the hollow men with holo men! Haha! Wow! How<br />

fascinating, that is so fascinating..." Ula mused, staring off into dark<br />

space and twisting a newly escaped curl.<br />

"Huh? Whatever. It's for classical music. Anyway, although<br />

principles of subharmonic gestures and emotional acton signatures<br />

were understood intuitively for eons, they were never studied in a<br />

scientifically reproducible fashion or developed in a truly artistic way<br />

with the listener's emotional response in mind. I did some experiments<br />

11

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