This concept shows some promise, but the current execution doesn't sell it much- the mystery 3rd party freaking out over predetermined music is all we really get, and it's not interesting enough to counteract the melodramma.
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I believe have successfully predicted the future. Our future. Please respond immediately.
:|
I didn't really feel anything from this, and the anomaly used to host the narrative is pretty boring.
"Stuff that just shows up on the Foundation's doorstep with no explanation" is always a silly origin story, and this seems like a hamfisted attempt to create a recurring character.
I have no intention of ever using this character again, but I understand the sentiments here. I'll see what I can do about the recovery method.
I also changed the last two notes slightly to tone down the melodrama.
if your reading this your gay
I disagree. To me, this is like leaving a baby on the doorstep of a convent. "Erich Zann" made these "babies" but can't raise them properly, so he is giving them to the Foundation to analyze with their superior resources.
Plus I like/am unnerved by the idea that music, and by extension, our future is predestined. Upvoted.
I concur about doorstepping in the general case. "Found by Agent Blackbox while on vacation" is the only lazy author cop-out I find more annoying.
But in this specific case I don't think it really applies. Because Erich Zahn is the opposite of that sort of lack-of-story. He is a fully plausible character with a clear and consistent motivation that dictates everything he has done.
The Foundation is nigh unreachable. That nigh bit is important. Anyone with the sufficient drive and resources can probably do something like this. After all, we're also not the only game in town. +1 for Eric Zahn in general and apparently having tapped into something approaching the 'The Red'/Life Web from Morrison's Animal Man.
Spider Robinson brought up a semi-related point in his short story "Melancholy Elephants". To oversimplify, the human ear is only capable of distinguishing a finite number of sounds and those sounds can only be arranged in a finite number of ways. So there is a strict limit on how many songs are possible. To be sure, the set of all possible tunes is a HUGE number; but it's not infinite. That's not even considering that a great many of those arrangements would be a cacophony, not something anyone would interpret as music.
Maybe what Erich has found is the formula that maps the position patterns of "true music" (the arrangements that a human brain considers non-cacophony) among that total set.
Actually, that's not accurate. The human ear is only capable of hearing a finite range, but there's an infinite number of tones/frequencies within that range, even if we'd have difficulty discriminating between extremely close ones. And even with a finite number of "discernable" tones, the number of combinations is infinite, because there's no limit on how long the composition is. Add in things like chords, harmonies, variable relative volumes, sustained tone lengths, and effects like deliberate static or fuzzing overlays, and the number of potential sound combinations is literally larger than the number of subatomic particles in the universe.
Giving bearhugs to the unsuspecting since 1872.
I would argue that if an unaided human ear cannot tell the difference between two frequencies, then they are not distinct for these purposes. So while the audible range is technically infinitely divisible, it is practically limited to a finite number of discernible tones.
By the same token, while variable length does greatly magnify the number of possible combinations, it does not make for an infinite number of human detectable combinations. Because any repetition of previous used patterns will be heard by a human listener as functionally the same. Take the case of Vanilla Ice versus Queen. The beat from "Ice, Ice Baby" is heard as the same as the beat from "Under Pressure", regardless of Vanilla's technically accurate arguments that his beat is distinct because he added an extra snare tap at the end.
So, yes, HUUUUUUGE number of possible songs, an inconceivably large number. But still a finite number. Inherent in the physicality of the human ear and brain is the potential for every song possible.
considering it'd be impossible to store every variant of even a relatively short song encoded by sine waves of identical length in all the matter of the universe, it is actually infinite because there'd be no way to tell whether or not we have heard a specific song before!
I like it. Delightfully eerie, not overstated, and giving me enough of a carrot to chew on for a while.
+1. Good on ya.
This is…interesting. Somewhat understated, but still enjoyable by itself. Have my +1
I like all of it except the last note, which is kind of over-the-top. I have no problems with Zahn delivering the stuff to the Foundation. As has been said, the Foundation is far from the only game in town, and knowledge of them and the supernatural is somewhat widespread. Even if you don't think he has contacts with a GoI or major government, he could still be a Foundation researcher himself doing some stuff on the side.
Look. There's some stuff I like in this. Such as the Lovecraft reference(probably a pseudonym, and a clever one at that), and the fact that this is a pretty accurate use of a "memetic" effect(inb4, you can't say saying something is memetic is wrong, sure, sure).
But, by gods, the melodrama. We apparently found out musical composition is predictable. And… that's it, really. I think this could use some more horror meat to it.
I don't think you read it thoroughly enough. We were able to confirm lyrics that an artist had not written yet. That doesn't seem very important, does it? That's because you haven't expanded the concept. If you can do that on that level, there's nothing, absolutely nothing, saying it can't be applied on a larger and larger scale. Which is apparently what Zahn managed to do. And what he found seems to have broken him.
And nothing says it can. We never get even a glimpse or hint of what Zann actually found out. This guy uses a Lovecraft character as his pseudonym and sends rambling notes to secret corporations(that happen to exist, but that's another matter). He is probably not very sound of his mind, you know.
As I said, this needs more meat. Just a little bit of show, but in the end what we have is Lovecraftian melodrama.
(Don't get me wrong, I love Lovecraft, but his narration sure was purple and dramatic by the buckets)
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page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
