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The Death Throes Of All Things

8 years ago1,581 words

I was amusing myself to the point of tears last night by altering the speed of music. Oh, the silly things that make me laugh.

I've been so unproductive recently, and that bothers me... Since the brain surgery, I've been in a 'resting and recovering' state of mind, and while it was good and necessary to relax rather than stressing about getting things done following something like that, I feel I'm well enough to do anything now but I still seem to be in that state of mind. It doesn't help that the days seem to fly by before I know what's happened, and that I spend huge chunks of them outside alone playing Pokemon GO... That's surely better for me health-wise than sitting at this computer, but I need to make something in order to make money...

It seems though that the more important I decide something is, the more likely my mind is to drift away from it, to avoid it... And to focus on procrastination or silliness instead.

Last night, I was listening to some music I'd composed for an old game... Miasmon, specifically; an urge that was spurred by the rekindled interest in Pokemon. Though I composed it years ago, I'm still quite pleased with it. Not so much because it's objectively good - I feel I'm unable to determine whether or not it is myself - but because I made it. Something not-horrendous made by yourself can be far more personally satisfying than something amazing made by someone else... Or at least that's always been my experience. I feel it probably applies to things like cooking, too. A meal's tastier if you made it yourself.

I've heard all my compositions so many times that I become sort of deaf to them, though; I'm too desensitised, and find it difficult to pay attention to them. In order to hear them as if they're fresh, I sometimes alter them in some way... I do the same with visual art. I'll flip or rotate images, shift their hues... Allowing me to get an idea of how a stranger might perceive my work, or to notice details I'd become blind to while staring at it during the creation process. For music, I might import the midi into a program I have which plays it with 'chiptune'-style instruments... or I might alter the speed by about 20%, slower or faster.

I was doing this last night, and remembered the fun I'd had with this about a decade ago with music that had actual human-sung lyrics; I slowed down something by Michael Jackson, I think, and for whatever reason found the result hilarious.

Do you know the musical Cats, by Andrew Lloyd Webber? It's quite famous. When I was little, my older brother was part of a performance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at school, and he had a ∞ cassette ∞ (I feel old) with the soundtrack, which I remember listening to with a sort of entranced embarrassment. My relationship with music was odd when I was young; I didn't listen to anything at all, ever, and when on rare occasions like this I did listen to something, I felt I should hide it out of an odd sort of shame. I finally started listening to Queen (my parents' favourite and subject of childhood memories) and Michael Jackson (after someone I didn't know listened to some of his songs in class one time) when I was about 15 or 16, as well as Classical music (which my father liked and had a few cassettes of)... But always with low volume, turned off immediately if my mother came into my room for whatever reason. It's an odd thing, that. So different from teenagers who blast obnoxiously loud music for all the world to hear. I'd always been deeply interested in the soundtracks of games, though, and some in particular had stuck playing in the back of my mind for years before I rediscovered them online... So I listened to those too. Around the same age, I started composing my own music, inspired by video game and Classical music, and... well, I'm getting off track here, as I tend to do.

I'd heard of Cats via cultural osmosis, but never actually heard it until I looked it up on YouTube a couple of months ago. The lyrics - which are old poems by T S Eliot from decades ago - seem bizarre and outdated (it's especially jarring hearing American performers sing references that only made sense in Victorian England), but I find some of the songs compositionally appealing.

I don't like ∞ this one ∞, though. I mentioned Cats to one of my friends not too long ago, and she mentioned liking this song the most because it was rocky, but being put off by the creepy sexuality of the dance (which I hadn't seen until she showed me that video, as I'd only listened to the music without visuals). The lyrics clash with the whole performance, as they're about a finicky housecat, and... well, it's odd, anyway.

Since I didn't like it, I felt it wouldn't be 'ruining' anything to mess around with its speed, so I did... and the results made me cry with laughter!

At normal speed, it's upbeat and supposed to be sexy... Gives the impression of some difficult but attractive rascal, or something.

At ∞ 175% speed ∞, it sounds like it's sung by a hyperactive munchkin on a sugar rush. It's still mostly recognisable as the same song, though, and the lyrics are easy enough to make out.

At ∞ 50% speed ∞, it sounds like a morbidly obese man lazily complaining while the musicians playing the instruments struggle not to fall asleep (∞ I picture this ∞). There are a bunch of long, awkward silences, and some of the instrumental bits (played petulantly on scrap found in a dump by the fat man's abused minions) sound strained and reluctant, like the whole piece has an 'ugh, if I have to' feel about it. There's an undercurrent of threatening hostility rather than scampishness.

At ∞ 25% speed ∞, it becomes a harrowing funeral dirge, accompanied terrifyingly by the aberrant gurgles and moans of the dreaded Elder Gods, their million mouths writhing in chorus as they tear apart the fabric of sanity and send the universe into an age of black madness. Any words are indiscernible; all that's left are the soul-chilling death throes of creation; the guttural spasm that spells the death of love.

At ∞ about 1/8th of the original speed ∞, it becomes a cosmic avant-garde symphony, evoking the echoing depths of space in all its grandeur, leaving pregnant pauses to bask in the marvel of it all; aethereal choirs chant in an alien tongue to open up the astral passages that lead to worlds of wonder beyond Man's wildest fantasies.

...And it makes me laugh.

It makes me think, though, too. It's interesting how we live in such a sliver of perception; how we see and hear as if through some slender slit in the vast spectrum of possibility. The light we can see makes up so little of all electromagnetic radiation; we're blind to X-rays, radio, all manner of things. Our perception of time is locked, such that anything that goes too fast or too slow eludes our comprehension. Do animals and aliens perceive sound as we do? If we met another intelligent species, would their media be impossible for us to absorb if their perception of time, sound, or the colours they could see were too different from our own? Would their upbeat, positive music - if they even perceived sound at all - sound as bizarre and differently-evocative to us as this slowed-down song does?

Makes me think of dolphins, and how they 'see sound'; they use their echolocation to sort of trade pictures with one another or to see through and inside the objects around them. They're closely related to us, but their perception of the world is so little like our own. Would we even recognise alien life as life at all, in that case? Especially if they'd had millions of years to transcend their evolutionary origins. I wish it were possible to know these things in our lifetime rather than just thinking and wondering about it all. Who knows what the future will bring, though.

Also, I feel like brevity is something I'm just not capable of. I ramble about irrelevant details; interactions with me become exchanges of essays. I just don't get how people can have conversations where their messages are only a few words, or one. I feel self-conscious about it all the time though, as I do about this now. It's a big reason I so rarely talk to anyone at all. I just can't do casual!

(I also imagine there's tons of stuff like this on YouTube and the like and me mentioning it would just make people say "yeah, I watch videos like this all the time", making me feel as out of touch as I actually am.)