Fractal music does, has, and will always exist

The entry is part of Intelligence-Love-Revolution research program, developed and led by Sepideh Majidi, with contributions from scholars such as David Roden, Francesca Ferrando, Sami Khatib, Maure Coise, Amanda Beech, Isabel Millar, Mattin, Shirine Saad, Thomas Moynihan and more.

Partner Platforms: Foreign Objekt, Posthuman School, Deep Objekt, The Space Gallery, UFO.

editingworldgrid.com

Fractal music is my proposition of a processing model based on the laboratory/task editingworldgrid, attempting to fluidify the connections between the notions of Intelligence, Love and Revolution. It is an ever-moving framework of philosophical, poetical and scientific approaches of sound. It starts from a wonder of what the three notions hold in common. The specificity of laboratory editing.world.grid is transversal collaborativity and years of investment in international sonic ground research, to support investigations in the fields of sound, linguistics, contemporary art, body movement and environments, drawing points between musicians, performers, dancers, choreographers, searchers, linguists, anthropologists and scientists.

Nobody did create fractal music. One can always listen to any environment as fractal music, as it was always there. Fractal music exists as a deep sonic environment, in a simultaneity of soundpoints, intuitively displayed in nowness, processed into music or words by the brain, the heart, and the environment. Fractal music can be defined as a moment of spacetime distortion, an environmental glitch, where image=sound, subject=environment, inside=outside. The highlight which is felt in this type of momentum is comparable to what is also called ''IT'' in Jazz. It is relatable in some ways to Galileo’s observation on relativity : Movement is like nothing.

The glitch can be described as follows. We know that when two elements are gravitating side by side, their trajectories can easily be calculated. When three elements are gravitating altogether, it gets immensely more complex to read their behaviors. It generates a blur, getting us towards the infamous three body problem. A fractal glitch would be reached when deep synchronicity within 3 + elements is noticed. As an experiment, I will keep track of the properties of environments as the central part of the equation.

Stakes [human systemic mappings], projections [speculated futures] or nostalgia [speculated pasts] can distract us to actually take the time to listen to environments as wholly. It takes plenty of time and space to focus openly on the surroundings. On a virtual level, so many details present in our world are still so unfathomable to AI. An AI image is spotted thanks to small details that missed the spot. Only deep attachment to reality [IRL] will allow us to be able to verify the authenticity of a photograph.

These details are so rich in informations, that the only available process to take them into consideration is to slow down, at least sometimes. So hard to grasp, in the vastness of our biased, blurred, systemic readings. Maybe all we need is an invitation to focus. Focus on our present environment, as the author of its own narrative. Because as Hubert Reeves wrote as an incipit to the 2022 edition of the french Grand guide de l'Astronomie''The biggest recent discovery on our Universe is that we now know that it has a story.''

I believe the story of the universe also shows out a writing style and, sonically, prosodic patterns. The story of the world is sonic and circulates through orality. At human scales, what if we start by focusing again, by entertaining micro-organic constraints in our biomechanics, to understand where our conceptions of the world really come from.

When details become familiar, The whole process consists in learning how to read patterns and cycles within environment imprints. In our era, working with communication technologies implies constantly navigating through various dimensions of timespace. The movement tends to be misleading, as an oscillation between subject/environment/ in a context of

The overwhelming sensation provoked by the mix of timeframes tends to blur the details, from grounded temporalities to Lead Internet Timespace. A special balance is required, to reconcile all temporalities into an everyday cycle. To handle this balance, essential to sound appreciation, I will interpret the arrowed equal sign developed by Benoît Mandelbrot:

This formula is designed to generate agency between two complex ensembles. This arrowed equal sign, litterally invented by Mandelbrot, is now common and valid to many mainstream technologies. My initial question was : why is it so rare to see this sign in common uses ? Why is this progressive sign, both admitting interconnectivity and breaking western linearity of reading in mathematics, lacking on our keyboards ? The silence surrounding this glyph is yet to be filled. My attempt consists in considering it like the third element to the triadic problem.

The overall framework of this research is notably inspired by Benoît Mandelbrot’s Fractal Ensemble, The linguistic notion of prosody, Donna Haraway's notions of nowness and sympoïesis, Josèfa Ntjam and Mawena Yewessi’s work on futuribles (possible futures), Warren Brodey’s research on soft environments, The CCRUs notions of hyperstition, Boaventura de Sousa Santos idea of an abyssal language, and Aho Ssan’s sonic views on Baudrillard’s Simulacrum.  Broadly drawing serendipian undercommons between these notions constantly allow the research to oscillate between reasoning/computation and feeling/ground experiments. To produce contextual, vernacular electronic music or soundscapes that adapt to various environments and art practices. 

Now, how to write about music, if it is simple trajectory from the heart? Music could be defined as a feeling translated into a subjective language. While translation tools can be developed for the sake of language and common grounds, this research can only be a lecture among others. Cognitively, it can only be received in subjective manners, generated by the consciousness of accumulation, agglutination, combination of every sound that we get to hear and process throughout our lives.

When fractal music is aired out, it produces an open, common environment, a common souvenir, that we got to live together. A common language, able to stimulate hypersititions rather than producing assignations. During collective sessions, I work a lot on speculative emphasis to try and generate invitations to hyper-listen. These contextual sonic installations have been called hyper-real versions of host environments.

While some IRL experiences generate direct fields of possibilities, their algorithmic and data pendants uploaded on the internet [the content] finds itself at high risk of being dried up from its essence, creating empty hyperstitions. A dream is like a seed. It needs real water to be nurtured.

Throughout this approach, I intend to cultivate realities by composing soft soundscapes, as inspired by the experiments led by Dr. Warren Brodey on soft environments. experimenting new dialogues, understanding, meaning, methodologies to understand environments or subjects through sound in its abstract state, as a post-language solution.

My artistic practice was born from a postulate that languages emerge from local sound [prosodic] patterns in our natural environments. What we hear becomes our prosody. Hence, it is technically possible to communicate a large panel of emotions or basic concepts through sounds without words. Reading sound through scanners, text, image interpretations, allow the constant development of new collective technologies.

Here is the Google definition for language :

If we strip language from words to get closer to the second definition, there will always be prosodic elements to understand it: frequency pitch, loudness, textures, colors, speed, tonic accents, rhythms, silences. Therefore, fractal music is directly connected to language.  In our current context, chosing to support what we have in common is a trajectory harder than ever. Nevertheless, it is still possible to grasp some of its remains, while acknowledging cultural specificities and unweaving stereotypes. As a Marseille resident, the starting point of my analysis takes place in the Mediterranean Sea, one of the richest crossroads for cultures. The Sea as an environment is the best invitation to deep listening. The blood in our human bodies is composed at 90% with the same components as Sea water.

The Mediterranean constitutes a rich example of a variety of languages that are still interconnected. Part of its mainframe, the Sabir, a vernacular language invented by the sailors to communicate and exchange. The language is a raw blend of Italian, Arab, Spanish, French and Occitan. The word itself is an alteration of the Castilian, Occitan, Portuguese and Catalan word saber, (Arabic : Al-Sabr, patience) holding from the latin roots sapere, knowledge. 

A certain discipline is necessary during the deep listening process (meditative practices, inner technologies, proximity with nature). Deep listening is like a sport. It needs to be practiced against the odds of sound pollution, the main affliction of big cities. To sustain speculation throughout deep listening practices, I stick to a list of notions, to try and bring out some acuity about the sounds and music we listen to, as inter-connected to the environments we live in.

Fractal soundworks can only spawn from custom, vernacular experiments, meaning the starting point of every proposition would be a unique narrative emanation of its own local spacetime and vibrational constraints, to craft dedicated sonic environments and emphasize the simultaneity of soundpoints/viewpoints, as an attempt to reduce determinism factors in sonic perception to focus on an artistic epistemology of what we share. When providen a simultaneity of frequencies at once, listeners have no choice but to choose for themselves what frequencies they feel closer to. This simultaneous practice is notably inspired by the famous work of late Alvin Lucier, I am sitting in a room, and his profound appreciation of heterodyne frequencies.

Theoretically, The model has to face several major problems. One of the main problem being:

As computational music is now mainstream, new technologies are numerous, to match sound with visuals and movements. Every sonic piece produced by editing.world.grid constitutes a soft environment in nowness, to learn and attempt to understand directly in a sonic manner rather than a worldly, calculative way. As an intent to cultivate common sonic grounds, with a blend of computational and organical inner-technologies, in a trajectory of maintaining ecological equilibrium and balanced understanding. What if a soundpiece was a place ? What would be its topology ? With cymatic studies, it becomes rather common that frequencies have definite shapes.

Reacting to this definition of topology, Warren Brodey cultivates the notion as follows: 

On a perceptive level, any natural environment may contain un-necessary elements for the viewer/listener/feeler. If we go on a walk into nature, it is not possible to see only trees, or only rock formations. We may favor some elements, but the whole meditative experience consists in immersing ourselves into an environment, and focus on whatever. The freedom of the process to perceive is deemed as essential. Sound accompanies the thought in some kind of blurry conversational feeling, like the environment has its word to say and the heart says say again? I believe music and sounds find their way to accompany us way more than it just seems like. It could even be the response to many western questions about how ancient cultures could build complex architectures, while being still able to feel the environments and produce cymatic based complex systems.

Here is, for example, an amazing document on the similarities between the temple of Borobudur in Indonesia and fractal, cymatical shapes.

Borobudur was Built Algorithmically, Hokky Situngkir,

Dept. Computational Sociology, Bandung Fe Institute,

Center for Complexity, Surya University

To be clear, fractal music does not pretend to hold any scientific value, merely a proposition to reconsider our deep learning methodologies, considering our environments through sound. This article constitutes a translation bêta-model of what can be heard and felt collectively, like a custom mediterranean version of sentipensar, (Saturnino De la Torre,  María Cándida Moraes) so to say, a subjective synæsthetic process from feelings to linguistics and data. Fractal music is an ever-expanding object, an epistemologic speculative UFO, to redefine language and communication in their abstract form. 

Cathara : Knowledge Against Violence, 6'20, music video

CATHARA : KNOWLEDGE AGAINST VIOLENCE is my proposition for the upcoming exhibition.

I composed and produced the short film Knowledge against violence as part of a corpus dedicated to a poetic reflection, combined with narrative technologies and fractal sound/imagery composed throughout my Intelligence Love Revolution residency with Foreign Objekt.

The short music film will be released with eight visual extracts of fractal imagery, sounds and notions :

I hope experimenting with them will provide more insights about the process. Do not hesitate to reach me out if it inspires you, as the proposition in itself is an open dialogue. 

I would never know if there actually is a fractal music from the Mediterranean, if I do not search for it. It has rippled in different parts of the world in many waves, sometimes violently,  but yet it holds so much peace. If it exists, then I must hear it. Listen to the deep environment. The Sea contains many messages. All of them are emotions. Some of them are conveyed through my DNA. I hear fragments everyday in the present. So I just do not know if I have to search for it inside or outside. In the past, or in the future.

Hugo Mir-Valette

editingworldgrid.com

This research is led thanks to the precious support, collaboration or friendship of Foreign Objekt (Sepideh Majidi), Josèfa Ntjam, Sean Heart, Niccolo Moronato, Désiré Niamké, Liam Warren, Leslie Ranzoni, Fabienne Guilbert Burgoa, among other friends, thanks to Angela Saracino, and my dear family so open to philosophic exchanges. Many thanks to Warren Brodey and Karene Lyngholm for the playful and insightful conversation. Here are some of the local structures that supported the project : DRAC PACA, Artagon, Rift, SOMA, Aquatic Invasion Productions, Association PLUS, Belsunce Projects, Bogiaisso Festival, Lyl Radio Marseille, Dos Mares, Parc Régional des Baronnies Provençales

REFERENCES

• Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South, 2016

• Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016 

• Stephon Alexander, William J. Cunningham, Jaron Lanier, Lee Smolin, Stefan Stanojevic, Michael W. Toomey, and Dave Wecker, The Autodidactic Universe, 2021

• Warren Brodey, Anthology, GUTTORMSGAARDS ARKIV, 2024

• Hokky Situngkir, Borobudur was Built Algorithmically,

  Dept. Computational Sociology, Bandung Fe Institute,

  Center for Complexity, Surya University

• CCRU 1997-2003

• Arthur C Clarke, Fractals: The Colors of Infinity, 1995

• The Undercommons, Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Stephano Harney & Fred Moten

• More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction, Kodwo Eshun

• Aho Ssan, Simulacrum, Subtext Records, 2020

PROJECT STUDIES

• Swell of spæc(i)es, Aquatic Invasion Productions, Josèfa Ntjam, Sean Hart, Mawena Yehouessi, Nicolas Pirus

• PLATEAUX FESTIVAL Liam Warren, RIFT ASSOCIATION

• Le son du vivant, Leslie Ranzoni

• Sonài, Niccolo Moronato, Bogiaisso Festival

• Marseille Shadow Works, Belsunce projects, Art Explora

• Mirrar, Mohamad Arar

• Apolatl, Fabienne Guilbert Burgoa