I am interested in the transmutation of information from one form to the other. I am intrigued by the concept that there are structural qualities of data which are noisy manifestations of some high-dimensional essences. I suspect that from patterns of these essences derive meaning, and that our cognition of events is one example of a system which can associatively compose and extract those meanings.

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It is my desire to concentrate on this confused idea in graduate school, that I might one day be able to express it in clearer terms. In the meanwhile, I have experimented in small ways with different aspects of this interest.

 

I designed and taught a course at Stanford in fall 2022, coded ITALIC 99: Introduction to Algorithmic Composition. The materials for it, which for the better part of a year have been promised to my friend Gibson (coolest guy!), are finally online. I have previously described my intention with the course as "trying to understand how compositional involvement affects the evolution of musical beauty." From this spins off questions such as "How close can musical beauty come to objective, or absolute beauty? Is the beauty of a work reliant on the human element? When a human being sets the rules of a composition, is he not essentially acting as the composer, and therefore still ensuring that the work conforms not only to aesthetic but also to emotional standards of beauty? Can therefore a purely random ruleset create a meaningful musical experience?" For those who find these questions irritating, the course creates some very nice beeps and boops.

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Over the course of time, I have tried to sonify data (in the same vein as my obsession with passing impressions between media). The results have not been musically piercing. I put some tools for sonification together as a Python library called anne, which I have not returned to since 2020. I will alter this paragraph when I fix her up a little bit, and perhaps write something about what she means to me (and hopefully, about what she means in general.)

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I love to read. I write and translate poetry. I like to go places. I have done some research correlating the signal complexity of EEG with the degree of consciousness of patients emerging from anesthesia. I am currently doing some research on semantic compression with Tsachy Weissman.