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Residuals
S02:E03

Residuals

Aug 18, 2026 • 37min 28s

Episode description

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

Source data: public JWST observations obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute, operated by AURA under NASA contract NAS 5-03127. Programs #1191, #1257, #1328, #1621, #2457, #2484, #2727, #2731, #2732, #2733, #2736, #2926, #4426, #4523, #4528, #5086, #5883. We acknowledge the teams led by Lee Armus (#1328) and Roberto Maiolino (#4426) for developing their observing programs with a zero-exclusive-access period. Observation identifiers are given above.

Audio © 2026 Far Wide Radio — licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

All artwork by Elliot Fairbanks Junior.

Archived and citable: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21693766

Series 2 contains material from the DESI Early Data Release (DESI Collaboration et al. 2024), used under CC BY 4.0. Full citation, acknowledgement and data credits: radio.enthropysystems.com/pages/attribution Series 2 is archived and citable: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21995512

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Far Wide Radio @farwideradio Aug 18, 2026
37:28 Residuals
S02:E03 Aug 18, 2026
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© 2026 Far Wide Radio. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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