Twelve Times Slower

One piece, one frame, four million pixels — and an accident we kept.

The traversal was asked for two minutes of audio from a NIRCam frame 2048 pixels square. A frame that size cannot be walked at sixty frames a second, so the recorder kept running while the traversal crawled, about twelve times slower than real time, until the process was stopped from outside.

What you hear is a two-minute piece stretched by its own arithmetic to twenty-five. Nothing was time-stretched afterwards. The clock was simply outrun, and the sound of that is a very slow just-intoned drone moving through a field it will never finish crossing.