Residuals

Twelve subtractions. Nothing here is a rendering of data.

Two files are put on one shared scale and taken away from each other, and the residual is sonified so that agreement is silence and only disagreement sounds. The sign splits between two voices, one panned to each side.

A cube minus a blur of itself is its own fine structure. A cube minus a median of itself is the detector’s defects — hot pixels, cosmic ray hits, single bad samples. A cube minus a surrogate that kept its Fourier amplitudes and threw away its phase is whatever shape survives that operation. A field minus its own mirror image is its asymmetry.

Of every instrument in this collection this is the only one where not hearing something is evidence. Roughly a quarter of this programme is silence, and the silence is the recording.

A note on the silences: this piece runs quiet for 10m36s in total, the longest stretch 2m02s. Nothing is wrong with the file. The silence is the recording, and here it carries a specific meaning. These pieces are subtractions: two files put on one shared scale and taken away from each other, with agreement rendered as silence. Where you hear nothing, the two files agreed. Nothing is wrong with the download.

This programme contains material from the DESI Early Data Release (DESI Collaboration et al. 2024), used under CC BY 4.0. Required citation and the full acknowledgement: https://radio.enthropysystems.com/pages/attribution