What we may say, with all rhetorically conjunctive elegance, is that a thing is in a sense. A thing is in a mathematical sense, or a biological one, or an aural one, etc.

It is senseless and misleading to consider anything beyond the domain of its emergence, outside of or independent of the sense that bears it.

As Wittgenstein points out, the sense is a special thing, it neither is nor is not. It may be distinct, present, unified, subtle, or not. From differences in sense arise clusters and edges, the basis of things.

The phenomenon of sensory discreteness is the basis of the phenomenon of cognition.

Some sophisticated behaviors are possible without cognitive tools (as a brainless slime mold may find the most efficient way through a maze to food).

But by making sense discrete and holding it there, enabling recall and reinvocation, cognition and its offspring language open up what may be learned or understood. The paths to other sense are shortened.

The tradeoff is the potential for inaccuracy, or put more generally, for greater incompleteness.

Work is in minimizing the space between thing and sense, and in curating the systems of understanding they support.

This may be handled best by bearing in mind that any thing is a predicate of sense.

Imagine the musical zone where you might find Edward Tufte hanging out, a smooth valley populated by aesthetically superb and informationally elevated audiographs. Though the large-scale structure of the sales data is too regular and constant (both for a single month and across many) to be all that musically interesting in terms of form, the constant hum of sales has a lot going for it in terms of internal variety. It is that variegated hum, the ongoing process of sales, that you can get a feel for by listening to this:

What is it I am hearing, exactly?
Every 45 minutes in real time is represented by one 100ms blip in audio time. If there is a sale in a particular currency in the given window of time, it will sound as a representative pitch in the larger chord (don’t ask me which 16-note chord this is, this guy doesn’t know enough about Theory to tell you). The mapping of pitch to currency was done as a matter of taste, but with the relative frequencies of each currency in mind. In other words, the most common currency types were given pitches that together make a nice warm center, and all the potentially abrasive stand-out frequencies were moved out to the fringes.

This has the added effect of drawing attention to less common kinds of sales, doing all kinds of great things for you acoustically and cognitively. To supplement this effect, the amplitude of the blips also favors unusual sales. The coefficient (or per-sale loudness factor) was inverted, so currencies that have, say, two sales at most in one 45 minute window will be louder than those currencies with 20 or more at the least. Things still get louder when there are more sales involved, but instead of harmonic mud there is statistical detail.

The twangy electronic timbre that peppers the top of this sound salad represents the strangeness of sales, as a function of the standard deviation of sales in a particular currency in the given window of time. If fans were hella cheap or crazy generous at that moment, twangification happens; the louder the twang the more unusual the transaction.

The last thing worth mentioning is the swell right at the very beginning. In that short span you are given (almost) the entire range of harmonic, timbral, and dynamic variation you’ll experience of the course of the next two minutes. I like to think of that moment as the definition of the axes of the graph.

How does it work?
Most of this was written in Ruby, with a ratio of approximately ten minutes of labor to every second of audio. Nerds will be nerds, after all. A small program gathers the specified data from a database, and hands that chunk back as a file. This file is read into another local program responsible for most of the work. It first distills a buttload of statistics from data, both for individual currencies as well as the entire set of ‘em. Some of the stats are used in playback, but others are around just to give an impression of the data at hand (for manual parameter tweaking, etc). The temporal resolution of the sales data is then reduced, from individual seconds to 45 minute chunks. Choosing that time scale (as well as doing reduction like this at all) brings the final output back from the far, monotonous plains of “the unlistenable likeness of boring” to a point somewhere near “bitchin’.”

To wrap up all the initial crunching, the program produces a pre-computed table of values for playback – the more work done before playback, the faster playback can be. Using the OpenSoundControl protocol, Ruby and Max/MSP hold hands, Max hosting the audio synthesis and playback controls, Ruby spitting out the parameter values. A bank of oscillators and amplitude envelope curves is responsible for the pure-frequency blips, and a coupled bank of buffers with their own envelopes gives the gritty sounds. The grit is a recording of the air and water systems at Bennington College’s Crossett Library, variously pitch-shifted to have the same fundamental frequency as the related blip(s). The recording is longish, so you hear a different part of it each time the grit sounds.

Listening to other months and time frames in the same manner, it is clear the graphs are growing louder and more harmonically populous. That’s the right idea.

If you are so inclined, you can download the track here: http://nrpm.bandcamp.com/track/cha-ching-may

The next day, also exceptional in its perfect summerness, I am ambling through a park – never further from a hurry. A burbling finger of the Waloomsac river fills the air with that unintrusive aural incense, as do the clouds of rustling oaks all around. Walking the path from one end of the park to the other, my blissful disregard is slowly overwhelmed by concern. Growing louder and louder are the shrill cries of children, hundreds of them. They sound terrified, as if a gunman has stormed their school. The trees obscure any hint of the horror. I’m walking closer, quickening my pace, the screams swelling in volume, and know that regardless of the situation I will be utterly unprepared for what I see.

Here are some exploratory thoughts at the tail end of making:

The sales are so frequent that it is easy to consider them on a larger scale: not just granular moments, but as the continual state and process of sales. Musically this translates into a hum, a continuous buzz. Give the things known about individual sales, how might they be sonified in terms of that hum of which they are a part?

Each small unit of sale, the atomic element of the dataset, maps onto the atomic, discrete unit of audible sound: the grain. The frequency and amplitude of that grain are tangled with the properties of the sale in appropriate-ish ways. The amplitude is coupled with the relative value of the sale (its cost), and the frequency is related to the relative frequency of the currency type in the dataset.

There is plenty of room for fine craftsmanship and artfulness in the way these properties are explicitly mapped. Rather than assign tuned pitches -notes in a scale- to the currencies (as was my initial choice) I’ve decided instead to merely set the upper and lower boundary for frequency, and map the relative frequency of the currencies as a continuous function over the audible spectrum. This adds even more information about the sales to the audio representation, without having to modify the formal constraints of the music. I may map the frequency of currency-type logarithmically over pitch to be easier on the conditioning of the listener’s ear (that is, the typical pitch distribution we hear out in the world, and how our vestibular system developed around that). The idea here is not to demand or necessarily encourage a different kind of musical sensation and/or listening, but rather to make the nature of the continuous state of sales perceivable in a domain of incredibly fine resolution. And to pull that off in such a way that listening is even pleasurable.

Little is fixed in the mapping; the way quantified sale properties correlate to corresponding auditory attributes is dynamic. The relative frequencies of the currencies & the range of least to most expensive sale are different in any given window of time, and so change. Is the scale of the mapping in the piece recalculated on a day-to-day basis? Month to month? Fully continuous? How would the latter be executed? Rather than modify the scales in discrete temporal chunks in one recording (ie, a different range for each month in a recording representing three months of sales) I find it appealing to use a healthy sample of 3-5 months of data, with relative frequency calculated over the entire dataset. I imagine this will likely accentuate unusual sales and, as one and the same, help avoid the pitfall of monotony.

When I think of how the notion of ‘generalization’ is typically employed, I envision arguments or thoughts with sweeping statements that bar or conflict with other thoughts or experiences (somewhere derived from empirical information, if even only cultural internalization).

These glaring sort are particularly helpful in illuminating the fact that generalizations are applied categorically, which is to say they ascribe some attribute to some range of things, already grouped together by some other attribute. Things unwind when it is realized that the definitive attribute (or ‘property’) of a group is itself a generalization, leaving the category rather baseless in terms of its thingness, or cognitive existence. It is rather difficult to wield a notion in the lexical expression of a thought when the supposed truth used to gel the object of the thought wanes; the object dissolves.

Words are very often conflated with categorical generalizations, with things, as the use of symbols is closely correlated to the invocation of ideas. As data words are extremely valuable, as they offer a quantitatively addressable way to handle the far more elusive, indiscrete things belonging to the sense. It is easy to see where a thing or thought breaks from a one to one correspondence with a word, however: multi-word terms, idiomatic phrases, lectures.

Textbooks are worthwhile objects of consideration – “Geology.” One word, that in its use, invokes thousands of pages, and on each hundreds of words, derived and honed to different degrees over varied amounts of time by untold numbers of people. Here, it could be argued that this renders it plausible for every idea or sense to have a 1:1 correlation with a symbol. Thousands of years of specific science, one word: Geology. But consider where tectonic plates are subjected, where massive quantities of energy are released and travel wavelike through the crystalline atomic lattice of the rock – fundamental geology gives way to “Physics.” The area is not gray, ultimately – folks point at this mid-spectrum body of thought and label it “materials science.”

The point is that all word correspondences are generalizations. Under some consideration, the term or notion might hold, under others, fail. We get away with using these generalizations every day because they facilitate communication by simplifying thought, reducing a virtual infinity of specifics into manageable sets of generalities. Given the explicit recognition of symbolic thought as the development and application of generalities, the apparent veracity and successful employment of the terms is remarkable.

What does it mean to employ this loaded notion “veracity” in this dooming context? I conceive of it, weakly, as the stability of its use. “Stability” I here couple to the definition of ‘empirical truth’ in the domain of questioning in which these various thoughts are currently being examined.

‘Empirical truth’ will range from cultural conditioning to seeing with your own damned eyes to irrefutably reproducing in a laboratory.

Generalizations are a form of abstraction, in that supposedly inherent attributes of a specific thing, ultimately indissolubly woven into a greater context itself, are drawn out and isolated. Where are we if every statement, without exception, can be unwound to falsity, unmanned with a snap?

One group of methods appears to be efficacious in declaring this blurry zone, the zone of ultimately false generalizations that, in their domains of typical use, seem to facilitate the navigation of reality more than they obscure it. The application of statistical methods at least brings the issue into a domain where it can be addressed: how often does the incidence of an attribute coincide with the incidence of the thing? This frequentist theoretic approach, to be valid, must also address the relative incidence of thing without attribute, and vice versa. Realizing that terms, sample size, and even method of counting are limited by knowledge and subsequent faulty abstraction advances the consideration. Here is the world of Bayesian statistical measures, which make it more challenging to get away with assumptions and pisspoor generalizations by realizing where the methods fail as generalizations themselves. This realization is not ‘known,’ but rather recognized.

It is theorized that cognitive processes (the sum of which could be suitably but incompletely referred to as “a mind”) can be described very accurately by Bayesian theoretics. “Accuracy” is here taken to mean that the theory of Bayesian statistics as regards the mind (“Bayesian inference”) breaks the fewest number of other theories in its applications, and if it does break some other theory, it does so in a way which causes less net breakage across all theoretically held ideas (all ideas can ultimately be taken as theoretical). When dealing with stability, veracity, or accuracy, ask how multiple kinds of statement or observation relate – what conflicts, what is resolved? Feel it out as far as possible.

If, given the strong relationship of mind to statistical inference, we suppose that statistical observations regarding the use of symbols over large swatches of time can tell us something about generalities that seem to tend toward truth, we are likely to be heartened, enlightened, and disappointed.

The perpetually shifting, gelatinous, notoriously indiscrete center where a mass of ideas in many incantations work somewhat fine together some of the time – that is where truth and society, by biological imperative, are perpetually in motion to resolve. Though there are theories that sometimes do an alright job of modeling how things evolve about that center, it must be realized that the theories, by being necessarily discrete, are necessarily incomplete depictions, and that the center, being no thing itself, has no constant behaviors. Behaviors, as defined, are abstractions developed by minds as they observed and generalized.

We, and other species in their way, have been impressively successful by working in that center, that nothing, and re-orienting the discrete abstractions, the ideas, around it via tweak, rupture, and external genius. There is enough overlap in our experiences of things to suggest there is, generally.

As a matter of fact, feats of engineering indicate that some generalizations over reality hold quite well, as does our radically increased life expectancy as a result of developments in medicine, and the evolution of macro communication following insights into electromagnetism.

Some generalizations are ridiculous. Baseless racism, other notions carried only via culture, and the global economic recession & its realized effects are more than sufficient evidence of this point.

It is often difficult to know which abstractions settle with no resistance over the shifting bulk of reality, and which are stiff, poorly fabricated facades, hollow despite seeming seamless.

The cudgels and scalpels of a pragmatic criticism should be applied to all things that stake an influential claim in or upon reality. It, being your consideration, must be willingly expansive, supple and ultimately based upon that center which you share with everyone – nothing.

The smallest whole unit, say a habanero, is sometimes at too large a resolution to work well at the scale of the process at hand. It seems to me that having to subdivide the motherfucker still results in the loss of ability to respire or taste.

This is not unlike arriving at the limits of scale of a given Lego collection, and feeling the very real practical and pragmatic limits of possibility.

What is there to be done? expand the set.

4. Breathing heater air in conjunction with consumption of alcohol, drugs, or medication is capable of causing unconsciousness.

M: “Isn’t that incorrect?”
A: “No, it is correct, just clunky.”
R: “Then shouldn’t we just say it is ‘not incorrect’ ?”

Anyway, the useful consideration here (when aiming to define the nature of the feedback loop holding a thing more or less taut in reality): What is it about the natural behavior of the thing that elicits a sustaining response from the environment?

The severe responses of Saturninus breed in Rome an unwillingness to challenge his madly egotistical will (we take it for granted that all things have their Tamara).

Frustration has become a key response to certain recent art. Frustration because the viewer is looking for a complete idea and is foiled. The notion of completion (i.e., self-containment) is at fault. What is thought and what is experienced continually replace each other.

Mel Bochner, taken from a catalog statement for Art in Series at Finch College, 1967

And in response I wonder: what then of the preceding generation, who strove for completeness and autonomy of the object through that completeness?

We should acknowledge the impossibility of this notion, perhaps scoff a bit at its hubris, but quite impressive is just how complete many of the works were in comparison to just about anything else – what an achievement!

Naturally this sort of completeness (of information, logical support, or definition, etc.) is not attainable in every domain, and certainly not in language. Bochner’s work quite obviously makes its money by exploiting that. There are precise rhetoricians, to be sure, of startling (if not discomforting) objectivity and singularity of interpretation. Granted, language is a relational system to the core, so it is certain to never be as “objective,” or more accurately “empirical,” as something akin to a Pollock drip.

It strikes me as irresponsible not to foster the relationship between idiosyncratic expression and improved comprehensibility, rather than dwell in the difference (originality and comprehensibility are not mutually exclusive, after all).

over curved, right surfaces below
a railway bridge neither of us has yet seen a train cross

water rolling down then spills off a stiff edge
into arranged rocks, sun-baked and half wet

as we are, nimbly leaping between stones in deepening water
where surfaces become fewer, further in

midway, in the cradle of the woods, the stream has an
anti-center of gravity, where we are suspended

in the weightlessness of nothing public

the body of the woods cleaved by the water
opens to a vast immutable blue of perfect continuity

at the horizon, one titanic cloud lumbers toward us glacier-like
luminously reflecting the sun, behind us, from its opaque surface

the airborne monolith appears stationary
or receding as I struggle with the distance

how long I regard this effervescent continent, beholding
its irresolvable remove and brilliant doom

we’ve time indeterminable before our knees creak in
the depressed barometrics beneath that vapor wall