Challenges in beam-formed arrays. Take an emitting source. And take a space with objects in it. Design the best system for the emitting source to communicate information to another source which we treat as reflecting and absorbing information. In other words, you moving around or sitting in a room with furniture and a speaker emitting sound. The best answer is beams that measure the space and shape the sound to fit that space. Since you’re moving around, the beams have to adjust quickly. Take you are standing: the beams find you and adjust the sound using a volume slider that keeps the various cycles sounding the same relative to each other as they increase or decrease. These are not trivial calculations, as anyone who ever tried to locate a pair of stereo speakers in the exact right spot for the exact right volume for that piece of music knows.
As an aside, I think one importance of HomePod is that it has the ability to teach people to enjoy music more by teaching all those who grew up with earphones how to enjoy in a room. It would be my favorite Apple device ever except I’m typing this on my iPad and it completely changed my life. My iPhone is more competitive in the ranking too, now that the X has added elements of necessary elegance. Back to the show …
Back to my equivalence of beam-forming with you locating stereo speakers. When you have a pair of speakers, you know exactly where the music sounds best no matter what’s playing and at what volume. You processed all the experiences of hearing music and mapped that information to the physical space of the room across a number of dimensions: this record sounds best when you sit right here and it’s at this volume unless it’s raining outside because then it needs to be louder except really something else would actually sound better and would be your choice if you had the freedom to pick. That sentence covers a lot of points: it pins spots in the room to specific choice, so if you have no degree of freedom to choose then you map the room this way. That map extends to another level: say you have no degree of freedom over the loudness, that though you prefer another volume all together, then if you have no choice you know it sounds better over there and now you have to consider changing your space, which means you cross over the map back and forth as you evaluate your options. Say you’re a kid. First reaction may be to move away and then you move to a specific spot as you become more aware of what has been making you move away. I said that carefully: you become more aware of stuff that is happening to you. This is true at any age. It fascinates me to watch it occur in children.
As an aside, I could say my journey has been trying to understand the depths and by that I don’t just mean ‘deep ideas’ but also ‘shallow ideas’ because depths is plural of depth. And I needed to understand areas with depths up and out, and then how depth in one direction is also shallowness in the other. That is how I developed the concept of Mudi. It actually comes out of me regularizing – meaning I assign repeatable labels to make a terminology that then becomes shorthand that connects to both words and drawings. I regularized my relationship to the other person in my head. I guess this has become a bit more than an aside. OK, I’ll go there. The other person in my head. Describe her. She’s gorgeous because I see her thinking and it’s beautiful. Messy and excitable and sometimes sad and everything else that I see in me. You may be thinking ‘are you saying you’re a girl?’ The answer is no. I’m male. But there is a female inside me and she’s always been there – in fact, I’d say she’s been in charge of many of my life decisions, including the names of my children. I’m trying to make clear that as the male in my head I talk to the female and we’re not the same. That’s a blunt consequence of my work: a Taylor Field is naturally male-female and female-male when there’s directionality. I can draw it for you. I’ve hesitated to add drawings to my work because I haven’t worked out all the terminology yet. I mean for example stuff like when to use a double-headed arrow versus a double-headed arrow made of two parallel lines. I only figured that out recently: first is for SBE drawings, second covers more situations, from tick-tock clock hands – because they add the layers indicated by the parallel lines – to the directional filling of fCM across the fCMd – by which I mean pattern fills drawings of squares and circles. I think double-headed stick lines for Start-Between-End and pattern filling pathways for fundamental CM in both fCM and fCMd. As a further aside, I see the sticks as separate from us; we as patterned objects move along stick lines in any direction, so the stick people work for both sides, for directions that nurture patterned objects and directions that reduce them. It isn’t because they’re evil. They tell you the truth about the situation without revealing what that means. The decision is always yours and each choice is an acceptance of a road they’ve shown you. They are the revelators. I suppose that when you’re heading into the abyss you might see them as soul-suckers taking away your essence.
And as yet a further aside, the other person in my head is the one I’d draw lines through my mashed potatoes with the tines of my fork, the one who saw each pea and who balanced eating this one or that one or maybe none because they look so cool in a line pretending to be maybe soldiers or maybe they’re dancing or this is the king, no the queen, and these peas are defending her from the fork. The root of my affinity to Taylor Swift is what I hear and see is the other person thinking. The closest that has ever come before? There are moments in Jane Austen when she shows herself and I see how they compare to her care in writing: like when Elizabeth accepts D’Arcy she doesn’t render it directly because she could not reduce the great complexity of that moment to words without losing the complexity. I’m sure she tried writing it as the narrator but she saw that didn’t work. She tried writing some of D’Arcy’s words but they all sounded false because she knew Elizabeth would break. Those pages are her restraint in love because as Elizabeth she could not speak Jane’s heart, and as Jane she could not describe Elizabeth’s feelings. She chose to render Elizabeth as patient in her happiness, allowing D’Arcy to speak words Jane herself never heard outside her head. She shied away at the end from portraying true love. It’s predestined love of two people across the widest possible diameter that separates them in their circle: he half nobility, all but noble himself, incredibly wealthy and at the very top of the gentry, and her half tradesman, one foot in the gentry, with all signs pointing to a drop out of the gentry once her father died. That’s how I see Jane. And bless her for writing Persuasion for Cassandra. What dos Anne say? Something like give a woman credit for loving even when all hope is gone. Can you imagine Cassandra reading that, hearing Jane tell it to her? This is why I went to Chawton, though it feels nearly nothing of her, and to Winchester Cathedral.
There is a moment in The Iliad when young Trojan captives are brought to him and as they beg for their lives he says we all die so why not here and why not now and why not me? This connects across to the Native American expression ‘it is a good day to die’ – attributed to Crazy Horse though I’ve read ideas that it was on old saying or not a saying at all but that it fit the conception of the natives as their way of life faded. It doesn’t actually agree with the little I know about actual debates in tribes. I found an amazing book in the Yale stacks. It was by a white guy raised by a Kansas tribe. He describes 3 basic parties: those who wanted to fight no matter what, better to fight and die than concede or leave; those who thought there could be accommodation; and those who knew more or had heard and feared more about the white men and who believed they were doomed. Each party had parts. The fight group divided, for example, into those who thought the Great Spirit would reward them for fighting with victory, all the way across to those who believed the Great Spirit wanted them to fight just to die. The ideas of the Great Spirit’s intent carried to those who believe they were doomed: did this mean the Great Spirit rejected the red man?
As to Shakespeare, I see him as an almost opposite of Jane, as a visage of the partner in her head: he pouring his nuance into the words on every page and she carefully withholding, carefully delineating emotions and situations. I feel Shakespeare enacts the male side of the emotions a woman feels. He puts dimensions into words as Jane puts dimensions into the characters. Can you say you know Hamlet? He says amazing things but he’s a hot-headed idiot whose inability to control himself ends up destroying the lives of everyone even to the point of the kingdom being taken over. Will wrote men better than women and then he doesn’t portray their inner selves as much as he has them say what the author thinks about inner selves. He was definitely Christian in his thinking. Think how Claudius goes to prayer, confesses his sin and acknowledges he can’t give up the crown and queen he won through murder. All his work is about love: of things, of power, of love so over-powering Romeo and Juliet end up dead by mistake, of love of the making of art about love. I see Jane taking the way Will wrote the ideas as coming through characters and inserting the inner lives that make Elizabeth and Anne and even Fanny Price more real women with real feelings in real situations where they express them as they fit those situations. They are, often to me, two halves of a similar if not same coin.
I can’t compare visual art so easily. How do I say why Caravaggio is so great? And if I talk about comparing ‘ideas’, then I start to describe me, so I’ll stop. I can describe me though: I put lavender bitters in my drinking water. It sort of smells like a gin & tonic and then it tastes like flowers. Those say a lot about me.
Take the song ‘Gorgeous’. I like to say ‘hello gorgeous’ to myself in funny accents. A lot of variations on English but also other language speakers either hearing or saying the words. I do it in a variety of meanings, from louche to what you say when you see a little girl in a princess costume (if you don’t say your majesty – his hand and arm move in a courtly gesture). It can be hello gorgeous to a mourning dove or hello gorgeous to the me I see in the mirror when I’m seeing me not as me but as someone I can say hello gorgeous too. I do a lot of hello gorgeous in a sort of 20’s gangster fashion that becomes more like a robot as I work on it. That’s why when I hear the song I hear myself – and this other in my head – tossing around the meanings. I hear play, sometimes child’s and sometimes adult, sometimes innocent and sometimes romantic and sometimes sexual and always in fun because even the naughty scenarios are play. Hello gorgeous he whispers into her ear. Her eyes twist to see him but he’s behind her and she can’t turn so she submits body and then soul, soul then body, piece by piece, quivering as the sensations flow.
Back, believe it or not, to beam forming. I can describe my work as beam forming. Consider my ideal square. Imagine it is your head as Between and S and E are your ears and . Or you pick a diameter of an ideal circle and those points on the circumference are your ears. Now reverse so what you hear is Between the points of your ears. You generate a match when what is Between your ears is what you hear, when your perception of what you hear matches what you are hearing. This counts across dimensions, so if you hear sadness that is because the music conveys sadness.
As yet another aside, a huge change in music has been occurring: the shifting of presentation of emotional content from traditional genre forms to combinations of genres manipulated to convey layers of meaning. Think Proust’s little cookie and how many words he needed to describe the pathways connected to it. There is much genre shifting – like what was mainstream rock has become more country-rock-pop as rock has fractured into its forms. Playing with a genre, sure, but also playing with genres and combining them. Art has been doing this as well: the explorations of space Hockney has done, the weird decorative backgrounds – often clashing – that set contrasting patterns (e.g., Matisse, African woven patterns, etc.) against realism. I actually did a series of things – back when I considered doing visual art – which were panels in which parts of a body were realistically drawn and shaded but isolated in demarcated panels and arranged so they did not flow in regular sequence of hand-arm-shoulder or the like. I also conceived of but had trouble executing – morally and physically – a series in which the attributes would be made of words or images related to the reading of the image itself. I mean for example a girl would be made partly of images of purity and physically descriptive aspects of design while the sexual part would be made partly of sexual imagery. I hoped to convey a more dimensional portrait, one which somewhat unconsciously made you feel different emotions and attractions as you looked. I decided this was too much.
So imagine you have 2 HomePods. How do they do the best sound? The answer is that you have ears and they can beam form to each side of you. How well depends on the accuracy of beam and its ability to shift location. You pick a center point – meaning you assume the Between in both directions matches head to noise – and then you pick 2 points to the side of any center and you make a space which you fill. But how about a chair? Can’t you map the room empty and then focus on what fills it? Yes, and you map the room with what fills it transitorily versus what appears to be solid, same as mapping the room itself. The more transitory the changes, the more the beam needs to form to the space centered on that one point and contained in a circle – or even a square if you just use ears and imagine those rotated 90 degrees. That’s an interesting challenge, isn’t it?
And what are you beaming? It’s the description of the emitter, meaning its information encoded as waves and packets so they generate the best representation of … what? You see the problem: what are you emitting? You can describe what you want in beam form because those are waves of sound that interfere according to the characteristics of the room and the objects in it. The challenge is deciding what you want to emit as your shape. Think of you in the world: you sometimes need to look tough – like you’re walking home in the dark, whether you’re actually afraid or just playing – so you make yourself look bigger or you move with a purpose that to you presents someone no one wants to mess with in a bad way. Or you want to be more attractive. Just look at all the things people do in the belief that makes them more attractive.
How do you beam sound so it is as big or tightly compacted as intended? That’s another layer of intent: the intent of the emitter to beam in accordance with the wishes of others as those wishes are encoded for emission. Because there is encoding – and there always is – there are limits to the accuracy the encoding has to the intent of the encoder. How do you read that intent? There’s a speaker reading digital instructions translated to impulses and emitting noise, and that means the answer is to read the encoded emissions and to emit them as near as possible so the emitter hears back what was emitted as that checks against the encodings. This is done to the accuracy and power of the speaker. When this is done with multiple/e speakers, there are difficulties managing performance. Let’s say you have an encoding that generates a wide and deep sound stage in which elements move to the foreground, to the top, to the back, to the sides, etc. Does it make a big circle around a listener so the listener hears elements as coming from farther away or a tighter circle in which the spatial orientations are preserved? I said it that way to emphasize this challenge is similar to the algorithms for adjusting loudness to maintain relative pitch loudness. You need to reduce the space so it preserves the distances and that involves adjusting volume because closer is perceived as louder and that invokes the pitch adjustment process.
Once you can manipulate spatial rendering, you should then be able to move sounds to the back more so the soundstage appears to envelop you. This means you as listener are oriented in your head to hear what appears to be behind the emitting speaker. That maps to the soundscape differently than you might think: it’s as though you were turned 180 degrees and hearing what the speaker puts out ‘last’ except you aren’t turned 180 degrees – I’m assuming you’re facing it – so you’re hearing a mirror image, which means ‘last’ comes out first. The traditional recording method involves, for example, a needle bouncing up and down on something like wax, and you cast copies that play back the impulses which made the dents. This became digital, but the process remains pushing out waves of sound that have characteristics that relate space location, loudness and other attributes. This makes a soundscape Between you. I’m talking about moving the soundscape so it envelops you, so you can step in and through locations of particular sounds. Imagine how Tali could play with your head if she can actually get to the side and behind you? That would be amazing! And yes, the exclamation point is for excitement. Empowering spatial play. I can barely keep it in.
Beam-forming maps multi-dimensional complexity to physical space. That’s what I do. That pretty much describes me too, thought that’s hard to put into words.
jomi: playing with perception 