Introduction
This page is about my album Zero Point, released the 12th of March 2020 on Mesh. Here I go into detail about the ideas behind the album and each of the tracks, and I'll post links to the music videos and other relevant tid bits.
Zero Point is my love letter to noise, chaos and all things random. Noise has fascinated me for a long time because it’s what everything at the same time sounds like. If you simultaneously heard every sound ever made in the history of the universe it would probably sound like noise. Lots of order at the same time tends to sound like chaos.
I knew my first album had to be about randomness, and I needed a source of pure random numbers to drive the compositions. In my search I stumbled on the zero-point energy field, arguably one of the purest sources that exists, and the implications of its existence filled me with an awe that I knew I had to try to capture in the album.
In quantum systems the energy of any point in space is always fluctuating, so even in a perfect vacuum the lowest possible energy can never be zero. This vanishingly small, randomly fluctuating energy source is called the zero-point energy, and it exists in every part of the known universe, including completely empty space.
At the big bang, the universe was small enough to have been affected by fluctuations in the zero-point energy field. Some theorists think that matter itself may have emerged from this chaotic soup, like the black and white pixels of TV static aligning by chance to form a ordered image. If this is true, then all of existence could just be a great coincidence, a fleeting alignment of shifting probabilities, and we should try to appreciate this incredibly detailed, continuously unfolding, self-aware structure before it dissolves back into the noise of the zero-point energy field.
I discovered a lab at the Australian National University that publishes real-time measurements online of the zero-point energy field, via a service called the Quantum Random Number Server (QRNS). I created a suite of tools that tap into this data to control parameters of the music - triggering sounds, moving filters and panning, and often directly as white noise. Each playthrough of the album was slightly different, until the final export which froze the randomness into the audio.
By harnessing the data from the QRNS and freezing it in time, this album is an attempt to represent musically the rarity of existence, to take a snapshot of an intricate ice sculpture as it melts, to enforce a kind of permanence to this momentary state of order in all of its beautiful ephemerality.
Dirac Sea Birth
Noise has a special place in my heart. I think it's an incredibly rich sound that simultaneously relaxes me and invigorates me. Due to its random nature, like Borges' Library of Babel it contains all possible sounds - you just have to listen to it long enough. Naturally the album had to start with noise.
Although it sounds just like white noise, it is actually the data from the zero-point energy field played back directly. There was something special to me about hearing in real-time the chaotic fluctuations of this mysterious, ubiquitous field that might have been the nursery of all existence. The track plays with filters to tease out different layers. All later noise in the album is the data from the zero-point field.
Resolving chords gradually resolve from the static, representing order emerging from the chaotic soup of the zero-point field at the birth of existence.
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A Moirae Opening
After the tranquility of Dirac Sea Birth, this explosion of sound represents the big bang, and resulting the chaos of the universe being born from the zero-point field. It is actually a granular summary of the entire album, and if you listen carefully you'll hear it speed through every track in order.
In Greek mythology, the Moirae are the goddesses of fate and predestination. Although fate can't exist in a universe built on chance, that doesn't guarantee we have any control over our future. Freewill may still be an illusion.
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Casimir
The casimir effect is one of the tangible results of the zero-point field, and manifests as an attractive or repulsive force between two plates placed very close together. The melody of the track was started on an old piano in a large hall where my cousin was due to be married. The acoustics of the hall were beautiful, and the melody just fell out as I was improving.
The percussive elements of the track are the first example in the album of the use of my voice, heavily processed using a tool I developed called the Reconstructor. This tool is based on a technique for audio mosaicing that I found in the 2015 paper 'Let it Bee - Towards NMF-inspired Audio Mosaicing'. Audio mosaicing is an automatic process for chopping up and reassembling a corpora of source audio so that it resembles target audio, analogous to how an artist might cut up magazines and rearrange the pieces to look like another image. In this case the target audio is my beat-boxing, and the source material came from tens of kicks and other sounds downloaded from Freesound.org.
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Emerging From
The zero-point energy field is a true random system - it is completely unpredictable. However, some theorists think that even matter itself is an emergent property of this chaotic field. If that's true then maybe everything we perceive as ordered could really be just a glancing alignment of shifting fields, like the random black and white snow of a detuned TV by chance forming a highly-structured, beautiful but ephemeral image. A great coincidence.
With 'Emerging From' I tried to reflect this idea by making one rhythm to seem to emerge from another - a slow, messy 4/4 into a faster more regular 5/4. Something ordered unfolding gradually from something chaotic.
The idea for the video was to design a set of simple shapes that start randomly displaced, but gradually slot into their correct placement, creating the sensation of something structured emerging from disorder. With the help of Archie Crofton, over 150 shapes were created and animated in After Effects.
The whole video was then processed using a custom machine-learning upscaling algorithm. Upscaling algorithms are neural networks that have been trained on thousands of images against low resolution versions of the same images, allowing them to artificially increase the resolution of images in a realistic way. After downscaling the shapes animation to 125 x 125 pixels, I used a chain of three different upscaling models trained on wood, faces and photos from Flickr, to upscale to 2000 x 2000 pixels. This gave the algorithm space to invent its own details as it upscaled - wood grain, cracks, hairs, skin-like imperfections - which results in very rich, physical images with lots of fine natural details. The whole process was entirely digital, but the result at times seems like it could be a hand-painted stop-motion animation.
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The Nothingness Of
The zero-point energy field is incredibly weak, but if it was as important to the creation of existence that some physicists believe, then the fact that something so vast and energetic as the universe emerged from it is something I find very special. The Nothingness Of is an attempt to capture that disparity of scales.
The track makes use of custom synthesiser I built, that is a cross between a piano and a convolution reverb. Each note on the piano is replaced with a tuned reverb, so that as you play the underlying audio is extended and made melodic, adding huge amounts of texture and dynamics.
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The Vacuum State
Reflecting the quantum themes of the album, I wanted The Vacuum State to sound like it was in a superposition of two states - two time signatures - while still remaining somewhat danceable. The track is continuously morphing between the two giving it a driving but ethereal feel, as though its stability is temporary and at any point it could collapse.
The choice of blending between straight and triplets was originally decided as a reference to the three doors of the Monty Hall problem, a thought experiment that highlights how when probability is involved, natural intuition often breaks down.
With the discovery of quantum effects, it seems likely the core of the universe is probabilistic in nature. However, probability often seems to go against common sense, suggesting that the future of physics may require us to abandon our intuitive sense of what is possible.
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An Epimetheus Closing
I wanted there to be a natural break in the album, splitting it into two parts. This track serves as granular recap of the first half, similar to A Moirae Opening, but backwards.
Epimetheus is the greek god of afterthought.
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A Shiver Sequence
Quantum theory suggests that randomness and chance form the core of the universe, and that unseen probabilistic processes may be the ultimate puppeteers of reality. This track was an attempt to defer more creative control to the randomness of the zero-point energy, and allow the data streamed from the Quantum Random Number Server to affect the music in a more direct way.
Although the overall structure and melody were pre-composed and remain static, many of the percussive details, other sounds, bassline and effects parameters were controlled directly by the zero-point field. This initially was frustrating because I couldn't grow too attached to any one specific detail - the next play through would be different. Eventually however I realised that even though that one element would be gone, maybe something else equally or more interesting would appear in the next listen.
If existence at its core is like a generative music system causing events to unfold based on some complex probabilistic model, the death of something beautiful isn't necessarily the end - its nature means that endless variations will be produced, and something equally or more beautiful will eventually emerge.
To highlight further the data from the QRNS, and to add a human element to the chaos, I sampled the voices of 61 friends and family counting the numbers zero to nine. These are stochastically triggered by the zero-point field.
The final digital and vinyl versions of the track are just 2 of over 100 unique versions I exported. The rest are given to purchasers of the vinyl, so that each person has a unique variation.
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A Pareidolic Sequence
Humans are innate pattern seeking machines. Our brains are so hardwired to find order in chaos that we often perceive it where there is none. This phenomena is called pareidolia. Seeing Jesus in a piece of toast, the Man in the moon are both examples of this tendency.
In that sense order can sometimes be subjective. Imagine seeing your debit card PIN appearing by chance in the number stream measured from the zero-point field via the Quantum Random Number Server. To you that would seem like order - but the zero-point field is known to be a true random system, entirely unpredictable and chaotic. So in that sense the order was subjective, to another viewer it would seem like more noise.
Coincidences are like this. Crazy coincidences are happening all the time but we don't notice them because they don't mean anything to us. We go wild when we meet a long-lost friend in a bar on the other side of the world, but not when a long series of unlikely events coincide causing them to leave the bar 5 minutes before we arrive.
Could it be that all of existence is just us seeing Jesus in a piece of toast? Perceiving the universe in a stream of purely random events? I don't think so, but it's interesting to think about.
This track started as a rhythmic experiment to demonstrate this idea, in which a series of random events would suddenly snap into place, giving the perception of a coincidence. I can't say that it fully worked, but aesthetic choices took over and I'm happy with the result, mostly due to Emily's lovely voice.
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Tunnel Through
I knew that I wanted a solo piano piece on the album, and during the composition phase before the actual production started, I was exploring new scales to try to force myself out of my comfort zone. I came across Messiaen's modes, and Tunnel Through was born from an experiment using one of the modes.
The piano was recorded in a piano shop in Gracia, Barcelona. I paid the owner to close for the afternoon so that I could record my incredibly talented pianist friend Nikos Stavlos playing the piano parts for the album. It's a testament to his skill that in just a few hours we managed to record 5 pieces, with Nikos sight-reading the awkward score that was computed-generated from the MIDI, correcting it as he went.
The shop wasn't the perfect recording environment with cars driving past and the shop owner dropping tuning tools, and so the final piece is a mashup of various recordings. But this worked in its favour because it forced me to be creative with the editing. The final result is somewhere between pure and processed.
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Spaces Far Below
There is something so vast in the tininess of the zero-point field. It's incredibly weak but so ubiquitous that according to Richard Feynman, one single light bulb contains enough energy to boil all the world's oceans.
This stark contrast in scales is common in physics, and it fascinates me. Distant thunder to me seems to have this discrepancy in scales. It can be relatively quiet, but something about the character of the sound makes you fully aware of the vast quantities of energy that are being unleashed. Inspired by a series of epic storms in Barcelona, I tried to copy that sound with this track. I wanted something that sounded absolutely huge, but somehow quiet and distant, like an approaching thunderstorm.
The bell sounds were inspired by wind chimes, but the end result produces a very specific image in my head - of vast halls of hoarded gold being thrown around by some sad lumbering giant. Not quite the image I expected but I'm pleased with the sense of space.
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Into
'Into' comes from 'In Two' referring to the two parts in this piece. It makes heavy use of the Reconstructor, the software I made that reassembles sounds to resemble other sounds. A lot of the percussion in this track is actually my voice, reconstructed using hundreds of sounds of falling rocks, metal and kick drums taken from Freesound.org. Every sound used was royalty free, and all the authors are credited in the section below. It's most noticeable in the build up to the second half.
The track makes use of a Venezuelan percussion instrument called the quitiplas, and the piano was recorded by Nikos Stavlos, during the session in the piano shop.
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A Flickered
The universe contains all extremes - areas of order and structure, of disorder and chaos, moments of silence and emptiness...and moments of intense, violent energy. Towards the end of the writing process I felt like the album was too pretty, and that it needed a track that would show the more aggressive side to living in a reality built upon pure chaos. I wanted a track that felt like a huge, rusty machine grinding to halt, a crumbling world in its last days before dissolving back into the background static.
The majority of the sound design in this track comes from a custom plugin I designed called Shader. I've always like the idea of processing sound as though it was an image, because that opens up whole new avenues of processing. Shader does exactly that. By taking the spectrogram of the input audio an image is generated, then the image is processed with an array of image effects such as brightness,, contrast and warping, and the result is converted back into audio.
The distorted singing is from my friend Ariadna Rulló.
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Zero Point
After the aggression of A Flickered, I wanted to end the album with a message of hope and beauty. If what some physicists say is true and all order in the universe is a direct result of the chaos of the zero-point field, then maybe the universe is truly ephemeral, just a great coincidence, and nothing will last forever. That might seem like a meaningless reality to live in, but if nothing ever repeats, existence is rare and each experience is truly unique, and we should try to appreciate this insanely detailed, continuously unfolding, self-aware sculpture before it dissolves back into the noise. And it's our responsibility to help other people appreciate their unique experiences, because there's nothing more sad than winning the cosmic lottery and being given self-awareness, only to not want it. Although it sounds cheesy, I think appreciating your existence is the root of happiness.
The track builds to a crescendo before dissolving back into the noise of the zero-point field from which it emerged. From the other side is born the beginnings of something new, an ultra quiet variation on the opening theme that gradually disappears into silence.
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Thank you to
My parents for giving me a solid platform to build on. My brothers. Max Cooper for his endless support and inspiration. My friends for their support and honest feedback. Nikos Stavlas. Roberto Valls. Anthony Faulkner, Mesh and The Wild Seeds. The people of Aineto. The Center for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology. Bass Valley Studios. Freesound.org
Credits
All tracks written, produced, recorded and mixed by Rob Clouth
Piano on ‘Casimir’, ‘Tunnel Through’, ‘Into’ and ‘Zero
Point’ by Nikos Stavlas
Vocals on ‘A Flickered’ by Ariadna
Rulló
Mastering by Blacklisted Mastering
Quantum noise
from the ANU Quantum Random Numbers Server
The 61 friends
and family that gave their voices
All the Freesound.org
users that shared the hundreds of samples used by the
Reconstructor. For the full list click here.
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