“Nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people.” Mark Twain
As of late, I’ve become a bit of a smart phone “junkie.” Apparently it’s never far from my side… And whenever I get an E-mail, text message, or MSN IM invite “ping” through, I pounce on it with blatant disregard for whatever I was doing, and subsequently get “locked” into a protracted, orgiastic flow of creative multi-media communicability. Well… At least that’s what I’m told!? Told by a friend who’s a devout technophobe i.e. he “still” rings me up on his 1960s rotary dial telephone to ask me how to set his VCR to auto-record a program that he wanted to watch on television later, but now can’t, as he’ll be out and about doing the soical… Perhaps the next time one of these communicability frenzies arises, I should become more mindful of it!?
Putting that somewhat freaky picture of social addiction to one side… I’ve got to be honest and say that I am thoroughly enjoying my smart phone for the pretty amazing little tool that it is. For me it’s the “Swiss army pen knife” of social and media interaction… One that seamlessly blends the day-to-day running of my business with the more informal social pursuits of my spare time. It’s a tool that is so handy it keeps nearly every aspect of my life “flowing” beautifully. No more personal organizers, mobile phones, cameras, dictaphones, Sat Navs and all the chargers that come with these devices… Nor anymore little scraps of paper with various E-mails, telephone numbers, names, titles of books, etc… scrawled in barely legible handwriting (with implements that range from empty BiC biros to freshly lit match sticks), littered throughout my pockets and back-packs… Now it’s all kept in just one little slim line device… Which has just one charger. I like to think of it as the palm grease for my informational groove (and ironically, just as I began to tap out this sentence, Herbie Hancock’s funky-cut entitled “Palm Grease” begins to play on the media player)… And I thank Zen for this new found simplicity! At the best of times I’m a minimalist i.e. I even sometimes begrudge having to take my laptop into the field with me. So to have a device that razors away all the old clutter of my “information-driven-life” is like having a close-shave and hot towel down at the barbers each and every day. It fits snugly over the non-linear dynamical discharge that occurs between the synaptic clefts of my brain’s complex neural network, providing my mind with joyous notions about the ethos behind a simplistic life.
Despite the condensed functionality and simplicity that this device has brought through its great design… I’ve had readjust my body and mind to a sort of 24 hour state of open communications… And, as a result, I have noticed that I’m getting a lot more work coming in. It seems the 8 hour working days, along with my geographical location, no longer dictate the way in which I deal with my clients… Even if I’m out on a recording job in the Scottish highlands (as I was just recently), when I switch my device on, I’m suddenly only a stone’s throw away from any clientele communication. When you deal with information, it’s handy to be able to access it anywhere, anytime and disseminate what you need to to your clients. With with this smart phone, I can now upload any client’s work to a public shared folder on my local “Cloud” and access/edit/amend any data that I need to. Everything is integrated into this ergonomic palm held device.
Which smart phone did I go for? Well… As 3 out of the 4 computers here at work are Apple Macs, and my laptop is a MacBookPro, I naturally chose the iPhone over a Blackberry or a Google Nexus type smart phone, mainly for ease of integration… And I’ve got to say, I haven’t really regretted my choice at all thus far.
But as far as my lifestyle has become more productive, I have become very aware of how sensitive my response to this new technological gimmick has become. And, with regards to this, I do have one important gripe with the iPhone… That is the totally lame collection of ringtones that it comes with. In fact… Just the other day, while I was waiting in a bus terminal’s departure lounge, I noticed how near-on twenty fellow iPhone owners were all using the same ringtone as myself on their iPhones!?! Needless to say that, while I was doing my best to catch up on some shut-eye after the long night out before, I ’subjectively’ heard ‘my’ phone go off with such a regular frequency that I barely had time to lie back down and close my eyes again before I was jolted back into consciousness by someone else’s incoming message or phone call! What a pain it is to be disturbed by a ringtone that isn’t even your own!!!
So as to avoid this torment, I searched high-and-low for an original ringtone that I could use… And I hate to say that I have come across NONE that suit my needs!? What with Apple solely using their own unique .m4r files for iPhone ringtones (which is based on their own .m4a compression system using the Apple Lossless Encoder), rather than the ubiquitous and trusty .mp3 format, customization/personalization is made all the more difficult for any iPhone user. No doubt you can buy someone else’s ringtone packages via the iTunes store, as I have done. But, be warned, you will probably find a bourgeois amalgam of sounds that range from crying babies, horns hooting, cars screeching, airplanes flying overhead, all the way through to bubbles popping, twigs snapping, people cheering, thunder storms booming, keys-a-jangling, etc… None of which resemble a telephone in the slightest… But all of which become either highly annoying after the first two or three rings (someone almost got lynched the other day in a cafe up North for their phone’s offensive ringtone) OR they become easily inaudible over certain types of everyday ambient noise i.e. while driving in a car OR down the local watering hole!!!
Thus I began to ponder about the sonic aesthetics of the “ringtone.” And I came to the conclusion that… A telephone should sound like a telephone… Not like my dog barking, nor my favorite tune of the week playing, or any other cluttered idea that seemingly provides me with some delusional personalized “depth” to my own individuality. For me, a ringtone should be nothing more than a ringtone i.e. it should alert me to the fact that someone is trying to “ring-through” in order to talk to me. Thus it should be easily recognizable as a telephone… And, within limits, you should be able to recognize your own telephone’s ringtone, so you know that it is your telephone which is in fact ringing, and not someone else’s… It should also be able to cut through all but the highest of ambient noises, remaining simple, elegant and unconceited in the process. Why should you have to pollute the environment with more banal ambient noises that might only serve to annoy and/or irritate others? Silence is rarely found in today’s culture… And thus, for me, silence is golden… When it needs to be “broken,” it should be done so with delicate, specific and mindful intent.
Bearing in mind these criteria, over the last few days I have strung together a collection of “no-frill” ringtones for any iPhone user among you who might share similar sentiments to my own. These ringtones are based on sounds that I have recorded live in the field and then re-synthesized in the studio. In the process I have pillaged, pilfered and studied many ringing devices, both old and new alike. And on the whole, I was irrevocably drawn back to the simplicity and commonality of the alarms found on antique machinery that our fore-fathers might have known. These machines ranged from rotary dial telephones and old mechanical calculators, through to old Singer antique sewing machines, typewriters, and Victoria copying devices, all of which I easily managed to acquire through FreeCycle, or found at local Car Boot Sales. For me, nothing quite beats that fervent “ring-ring” pattern of metal striker upon metal bell, providing the true essence of what all modern alarm ideals are based upon i.e. the alert that bids one to pay attention to whatever it is that needs attention paid to it.
A Singer Model 12 antique sewing machine that was used as a sound source for some of the ringtones below.
Much fun was had compiling these sounds, and along the way I met many an interesting person who made me very aware of just how far mankind has come technologically i.e. by exchanging most of the manual aspects of the classic, antique “machinery” design for the “lazy” electronic dependence of power grid modernity. While these “tocsins” certainly aren’t anything flamboyant, they are simple, understated, elegant and timeless… Centred around the essence of this common, yet classic, antiquarian alarm design, the idea has been modestly evolved into several novel electronic derivations, so as to provide one with a comprehensive selection of ringtones from which to be alerted by. But, probably more importantly, you’ll be able to hear these ringtones over much of the “usual” everyday ambient noise… And do so without annoying too many people in the process and/or getting confused about whether that is in fact your phone, which is ringing, or someone else’s…
Oh… And did I mention they are free too!?
Please Note: These are provided in the .m4a file format, which will not work on the iPhone directly as a ringtone! So… In order to change them into iPhone ringtones, once you’ve downloaded the files you’ll need to convert them into the .m4r format. This is simply done by changing the “.m4a” suffix to “.m4r” i.e. change the “a” to an “r” just as you would when changing a file-name on your computer. It’s really that easy… Then all you have to do is open them in iTunes. Once in iTunes, you can then sync your iPhone and, providing you have selected the right settings, the ringtones should automatically be uploaded to your device ready for use.
If you have any comments about any of the above ringtones, OR if you have any personalized requests, please feel free to leave a note below, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
OR… If you are using an Apple Mac computer, you can try creating your own ringtone by using the “iPhone Ringtone Maker” application.
In honor of the late Edward Lorenz, I proffer the following brief insight into the basis of his life’s work… And, as a sort of token for this insight, I feel compelled to offer some of our own interpretations; interpretations, via the medium of musical/sonic form, that are derived purly from his enlightening expositions.
Picture 1. Edward Norton Lorenz - May 23, 1917 to April 16, 2008
It is the findings and implications gleaned from Lorenz’s body of works that has so inspired me to further study their implications. As a result, I feel much the better for having glanced at the beauty behind the ‘irrational,’ which is seemingly so characteristic of certain types dynamical system. While the significance about the way various basins of attraction might interact with one another would no doubt have eventually come to light within the scientific community (something that was first alluded to by Jules Henri Poincaré), it was Edward’s work which hastened the inevitable birth of a new science proper – namely the science of non-linear dynamical systems – and so proffered to erudition a better analogy with which to understand the unpredictable eddies and flows that swirl around us all daily.
The Lorenz attractor, named after its founder, is a fractal structure corresponding to the long-term behavior of the Lorenz oscillator. The Lorenz oscillator is a “3-dimensional” i.e. it has three variables, dynamical system that exhibits chaotic flow, and is well noted for its ‘lemniscate’ shape (a term used in algebraic geometry to refer to an object that has a likeness to the figure eight’s form).
The oscillator was originally used by Lorenz as a simplified model for convectional flow within earth’s atmosphere. The map (see both figures 1 and 2 below) shows how the state of a dynamical system (the three variables interdependently fluxing through time within a 3-D phase-space plot) evolves in a complex, non-repeating pattern.
Figure 1.
Figure 1. appeared in the Nature journal 31 August 2000, pp 949 as part of an article titled The Lorenz Attractor Exists, written by Ian Stewart. It was created as part of an OpenGL interactive viewer and rendered on a farm of Dec Alphas using ProRay.
In 1961, Lorenz had managed to create a skeleton of a weather system from a handful of differential equations. He kept a continuous simulation running on an extremely primitive analog computer that would output a day’s progress in the simulation every minute as a line of text on a roll of paper. Evidently, the whole system was very successful at producing “weather-like” output – nothing ever happened the same way twice, but there was an underlying order that delighted Lorenz and his associates.
…Line by line, the winds and temperatures in Lorenz’s printouts seemed to behave in a recognizable earthly way. They matched his cherished intuition about the weather, his sense that it repeated itself, displaying familiar patterns over time, pressure rising and falling, the airstream swinging north and south. (GLEICK, J. Chaos: Making a New Science.)
What Edward Lorenz had discovered was a chaotic system. Even though a computer had control of the simulation, and certainly possessed the capability to generate random numbers at will, there was nothing random about any portion of the way the simulation was supposed to work. It merely followed the laws of calculus as set down by Sir Isaac Newton himself and outputted a day’s worth of virtual weather at the end of each minute. Lorenz’s initial brush with chaos is described best by James Gleick’s own words, from Chaos:
One day in the winter of 1961, wanting to examine one sequence at greater length, Lorenz took a shortcut. Instead of starting the whole run over, he started midway through. To give the machine its initial conditions, he typed the numbers straight from the earlier printout. Then he walked down the hall to get away from the noise and drink a cup of coffee. When he returned an hour later, he saw something unexpected, something that planted a seed for a new science.This new run should have exactly duplicated the old. Lorenz had copied the numbers into the machine himself. The program had not changed. Yet as he stared at the new printout, Lorenz saw his weather diverging so rapidly from the pattern of the last run that, within just a few months, all resemblance had disappeared. He looked at one set of numbers, then back at the other. He might as well have chosen two random weathers out of a hat. His first thought was that another vacuum tube had gone bad.
Suddenly he realized the truth. There had been no malfunction. The problem lay in the numbers he had typed. In the computer’s memory, six decimal places were stored: .506127. On the printout to save space, just three appeared: .506. Lorenz had entered the shorter, rounded-off numbers, assuming that the difference-one part in a thousand-was inconsequential.
It was a reasonable assumption. If a weather satellite can read ocean-surface temperature to within one part in a thousand, its operators consider themselves lucky. Lorenz’s Royal McBee was implementing the classical program. It used a purely deterministic system of equations. Given a particular starting point, the weather would unfold exactly the same way each time. Given a slightly different starting point, the weather should unfold in a slightly different way. A small numerical error was like a small puff of wind – surely the small puffs faded or canceled each other out before they could change important, large-scale features of the weather. Yet in Lorenz’s particular system of equations, small errors proved catastrophic.
And there is the show-stopper: small errors prove catastrophic! Lorenz entitled a 1972 paper, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” and the title stuck. Today, sensitive dependence on initial conditions is referred to as “The Butterfly Effect.”
For the purposes of experimentation, Lorenz created a new system with three nonlinear differential equations:
dx / dt = a (y – x)
dy / dt = x (b – z) – y
dz / dt = xy – c z
It was a reduced model of convection, similar to the swirls of cream in a hot cup of coffee, only much, much, much simpler. And yet, the shear complexity, along with the never ending richness of form that it generated, demonstrates the sovereign and almost “God-like” majesty that lies behind two simple basins of attraction… The resulting unpredictability woven into their subtle networks of force are truly startling!
Ever since my first glance at one of these phase-space extrapolations, I have had a deep sense of longing to port this ideal into the sonic realm so as to investigate rhythmic form, wondering whether listening to the chaos inherent within a Strange Attractor might in some way provide deeper insight into the aural aesthetics of never repeating, endless novel flow.
Figure 2.
So without further ado, I offer a snippet from an on going project called “Strange Attractions…” A project that allows us to ’simply’ port over some of the visual ideas seen above i.e. data flowing through 3-D phase spaces, into sonic gardens of chaotically grown rhythms and melodic modulations. While some of these recordings will no doubt sound like true chaotic flows, others will have a more musical coherence within their temporal passage. This is a direct result of some re-structuring on our part. Nonetheless, non-linear systems still reside at the core of these compositions, and thus, despite their preternatural arrangements, chaos can still be found within their flow… For it is the chaos built into the programs that we use which provides our sensibilities with the novel and diverse fragments of rhythmic undualtion from which we assimilate our sonic forms… And, just as the non-linear dynamics inherent within our body’s own biological system provides the impulse for action, we see a type cynosure functioning for our seemingly “conscious” selves, and thus the guidance is derived from that universal law of “God, or Nature.”
We hope you enjoy listening to them as much as we enjoyed making them:
Track 1 – Lorenz Experiments – Version 1.54
Track 2 – Lorenz Experiments – Version 4.692
Track 3 – Lorenz Experiments – Version 0.78 a.k.a. Rhythm In The Numbers (Hexadecimal Mix)
Lastly… A big thank you to Edward Lorenz. R.I.P.
