Stochastic Google
Posted on | April 22, 2008 |
If I stripped away everything from my persona, I’d say I’m a composer at the core; a sensibility that’s served me well as a mastering engineer, as I’m trying to make recordings “more musical” and hear inside them to know what to bring out.
In 20th Century composition, there’s a compositional technique known as “stochastic.” Something Iannis Xenakis sort of pioneered.
sto·chas·tic adj
1. involving or showing random behavior
2. involving or subject to probabilistic behavior
3. involving guesswork or conjecture (formal)
I was typing out some parameters for a guitar I’d like to have a luthier build for me. One of the sentences read, “No inlay on the fretboard. Not even dots. I’d like it completely black/ebony.” I realized I wanted to put it higher in the listing order, so I cut-and-pasted it.
I got sidetracked and had to actually do some work. Then, when I came back to the computer I wanted to paste in a URL I’d sent someone as an e-mail. I pasted in what I thought was the URL into the address bar, but instead it pasted in “No inlay on the fretboard. Not even dots. I’d like it completely black/ebony.” Without looking, I hit “enter”.
It turned into a Google search…and the results were fascinating, rendering things I probably could have never found (or thought to search for) on my own.
It’s a good composition tool, and it’s kind of fun for search engines, too.
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From Ohm to Om reflects the opinions of mastering engineer Paul Abbott, owner of San Diego's ZenMastering.
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