An integration loop

Westernmost Colossus of the Temple of Re, 1850, Maxime Du Camp

I encourage you to press the play button below, then con­tinue reading. Later, you’ll find another ver­sion of this piece, trans­formed by con­tri­bu­tions from dozens of other people.

An integration loop, pt. 1 (5:16) CC0 MP3 Spotify

Meet a melody:

Its origin is a mystery. Composer, performer, recording: all unknown. The year of its cre­ation is unknown. All we know is how it sounds: stately and nostalgic.

And we know where it played, at least once.

Mon­i­toring a radio sta­tion in New York City, the com­poser William Basinski hears the melody, records it. He intends to use a frag­ment as a loop in an avant-garde music project. The tape goes into a box. It is the 1980s.

It is decades later: the summer of 2001. Dig­i­tizing a room full of for­gotten material, Basinski finds this loop again. But the tape is old; as it moves through the player, it starts to come apart, the mag­netic medium peeling off its plastic backing, more and more with each repetition. Enthralled, Basinski keeps recording as the melody dis­in­te­grates before his eyes, his ears.

Standing on his rooftop in Brooklyn, Basinski watches the World Trade Center collapse. It is Sep­tember 11, 2001. Suddenly, the summer’s record­ings have a meaning, a purpose. He titles them The Dis­in­te­gra­tion Loops and offers them as an elegy for the dead. They are heart­breaking and, before long, beloved.

Seated inside the Met­ro­pol­itan Museum of Art’s iconic Temple of Dendur, the Word­less Music Orchestra performs Maxim Moston’s arrangement of the first reel of The Dis­in­te­gra­tion Loops. After the last note sounds, the audi­ence sits for two full min­utes in silence, then bursts into applause. It is Sep­tember 11, 2011.

Lis­tening to NPR, I hear this performance. I save the MP3 (forty min­utes long!) and return to it often. It is my pri­mary expe­ri­ence of The Dis­in­te­gra­tion Loops. I truly love it.

Years later, working in my media lab, I feed NPR’s recording into a neural net­work — a rough AI. The com­puter struggles; it doesn’t know any­thing about notes or scales, horns or drums, tape loops or memo­rial concerts — only samples, the stand­alone grains of dig­ital sound. But, in its struggle, I hear some­thing evocative: an uncertainty, a brokenness, that seems to match the mythos of Basinski’s piece. It is the summer of 2019.

As the net­work churns, I ask it to gen­erate short pieces, hun­dreds of them. For sev­eral months, this is my morning ritual: wake up, make coffee, and listen to the pieces the net­work has gen­erated overnight, rejecting most, saving one or two. From that curated col­lection, I select about a dozen and sequence them using Ableton Live. I use sev­eral plu­gins to process and master the sequenced piece, mindful not to smooth over the crunch and hiss that is the neural net­work’s signature, and then I publish it.

So. This melody, which was played at some point on a real horn — well, maybe it was real; who knows? — has now passed through radio waves and mag­netic tape and dig­ital memory, into the mind of an arranger and back out into the phys­ical world — an echo in the Temple of Dendur — then through the internet and now into a neural net­work. Yet, through all those degra­da­tions and digitizations, resus­ci­ta­tions and transformations — a heck of a flip-flop—it has never suc­cumbed to noise; not all the way.

A stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia transcribed the melody that Basinski recorded, and I played it once myself on a mod­ular synthesizer. That’s what you’ll hear (or have heard) at the end of this piece: the ini­ti­a­tion of a new loop.

An integration loop.

After I published the first ver­sion of this post in April 2020, I invited anyone reading to join me by playing or singing the melody once through — 

—using what­ever instru­ment (including their voice) and recording device (including their phone) was closest to hand. I received many con­tri­bu­tions, and together, they became this:

An integration loop, pt. 2 (7:09) CC0 MP3 Spotify

This piece com­bines con­tri­bu­tions from Aaron Lammer, Adam Roberts, Albert Kong, Alexandra Grabarchuk, Angela Winter, Anna­beth Carroll, Alex Hern, Alek­sandr Maletin, Anthony Weintraub, Chris Schlusser, Dan Bouk, David Renshaw, Deli­cious Democ­racy (Brianna McGowan and Sam Bonar), Evan Goldfine, Greg Baker, Gueorgui Tcherednitchenko, Hayden Higgins, James Finnis, Jameson Brown, Jason Black, Jennifer Stout, Jeremy Brooks, Jeremy Keith, Jessica Spengler, Joe Iovino, Jonah, Jonathan Troyer, Kevin Evans, Lily Sloan, Mark Sullivan, Marta Kvande, Matt Penniman, Matt Silas, Max Lambertini, Méduse, Michael Ashbridge, Michael Donaldson, Nik Von Frankenberg, Nikolai Polikurov, Nikolay Shebanov, Sam Hollis, Shaun Williams, Stephan Terre, Thom Wong, Tilma of Malack (Thane of the Nether), Tomorrow’s Man, Will Fraker, William Bouk, and William Cohen, along with sev­eral con­trib­u­tors uncred­ited at their request.

Listen, and you’ll hear their voices (and syn­the­sizers and pianos and guitars — mandolins too) battle the noise, over­match it. In my imagination, each con­tri­bu­tion is a rung in a ladder out of the pit of con­fu­sion and loss, all of us both (a) car­rying the melody for­ward and (b) being car­ried by it, up towards some­thing new, some­thing whole.

Dah-dahhh … da-da-da, da-da-da!

Colosse mono­lithe d'Amenophis III, 1849–50, Maxime Du Camp

March 2020, Oak­land