The recordings we are sharing today are very short excerpts from Earthsong, a piece about how our planet moves, music that never stops changing…and computer programming.

I started programming in the Max / MSP environment about 5 years ago. During the pandemic, however, I felt I needed to try my hand at real programming in the face of an uncertain future for the performing arts. Soon after getting a feel for the basics of Javascript however, my interests turned back to the potential to create sound worlds through the use of algorithms, and away from any marketable skill sets.

Particularly, I'm drawn to the idea of using the Internet as an "environment" for a sonic installation, a common denominator where anyone with access to the Internet can share the environment. I began to think of music experiences that can only exist on the Internet, that can be dynamic based on various inputs. The six 1-hour samples used to make this piece are just re-creations of a moment in time. The music never really begins or ends — it's infinite and eternal. What you get when you load the page is a calculation of what the piece should sound like at that time and place. Closing the page doesn't mean the piece is over, it just means you're finished observing it for now.

Earthsong is a loop that takes one rotation of the earth's orbit around the sun to complete. The seven tones of varying length start together on midnight, Jan 1st, and don't line up again until exactly one year later. The pitches of these tones are in unison during sunrise and sunset, and drift farther apart until solar and lunar noon, when they begin their descent back to unison. Similarly, a set of seven short tones follow a shorter cycle that takes a full lunar cycle to complete, reaching their maximum density at lunar noon and disappear completely by solar noon. In this way, the formal structure of Earthsong is determined by the natural cadences of our planet.

It's quite impossible for the piece to exist in its true form on a conventional streaming or digital format - a standard audio file containing a year-long loop would be approximately 5.73 terabytes, far exceeding the 2-gig max for the .wav format, let alone the less-than-one-hour limit for Bandcamp uploads. This also doesn't even account for the fact that there are an infinitely different number of sunrise and sunset times on our planet, and an infinite number of times when someone can begin listening to the piece during its course. In this way, the piece is deliberately, and perhaps frustratingly, un-stream-able. It abides on its own corner of the Internet, reflecting the stubborn traverse of our tiny rock circled by an even tinier rock through infinite space.

The version of Earthsong that will play in a normal web browser is still being constructed. I hope to have its "premiere" on some astronomically significant date in the near future relative to our human lifespans.

Until autumn,
Greg Chudzik
of Briars of North America