THE ENFOLDING
What is it like to be truly alone? Most of the time we can’t escape human noise. If you live in a city, there is the clamor of traffic, shipping, construction, air travel, and so on, all around. This anthrophony is so pervasive that we often tune it out to the point where it becomes just another texture of everyday life.
If you travel outside the city, you would still have to go to some very remote places to avoid the noisy transmissions of humanity. But even in the most remote places on the planet, like the vast boreal forests of Siberia and the Yukon Territory, the biophony of nature still can be interrupted by high flying aircraft, all terrain vehicles, or the occasional GPS enabled eco-tourist.
So where is real solitude then? You would have to leave the terrestrial sphere to begin to even approach it. You would have to go to the edge of the solar system and find a comet, one of those icy objects left over from terrestrial formation in the Oort Cloud. Thousands of years can pass before a comet might complete its orbit around the sun. For most of their existence, these objects are scattered at such vast distances that, from our point of view, they may as well not be moving at all. Their only point of reference is the radiant point at the center of their aeon-long procession.
Yet even the Oort Cloud is not free of anthrophony. Our radiosphere is still expanding out into the void at the speed of light. While our signals might degrade and become lost in interstellar noise, I wonder: What dream transmissions might the lonely objects of the outer solar system send?
SIDE A, 10:48
Voice: Dakota Gearhart
Synthesizer: Matthew Spencer
SIDE B, 10:10
Voice: Unknown
Synthesizer and programming: Guy Merrill
MIDI was derrived from NASA OMNIWeb Plus data.
Integer conversion by Bryan Carr;
JAVA coding and MIDI conversion by Stephen Steffs.
Created by Guy Merrill, 2015
Text adapted from “The Enfolding,” by Unknown
Produced, edited,
and designed
by Guy Merrill
Mastered by Scot Michael at
Titan Recording Studio, Seattle WA