Enigman2022 +4

Enigma n2022 is a philosophical music & poetry toy for poets, musicians & philosophers from the age of 7 up.

If you do nothing, it performs in 'gallery mode'—which it enters when there's no input for 2 minutes. You just watch and listen, then. If, on the other hand, you interact via touch, mouse or keyboard, it enters 'interactive mode' and responds.

Click/tap the background until it's funky—or click and hold for zipFunk, which fast-forwards you into the unknown, through revolutions of the meanometer color pie at top left (eventually).

Set the speed of meaning slider, the audio pitch range, anywhere from 10 octaves down from normal to 2 octaves up. You glimpse different worlds of meaning in the different levels of pitch—though the 5-second audio source sound is vocal—of the word 'meaning' intoned thrice,
played backwards once,
forwards twice.

Different levels of pitch; different levels of meaning of the material. Different staggered layers of slivers; different generated levels of color and repeated sound.

Just like the microscope showed us a whole new world smaller than we had known, microsound and pitch changes let us hear a whole new world just below the surface of sound.

The audio consists of simultaneous slivers of sound—called 'grains' in the world of 'granular synthesis' (this is that world). 'Slivers' is more apt here—even 'stripes': each of the onscreen stripes represents a sliver, or short sample of audio, usually looped, sampled from the sole 5-second sound file from which all of the audio derives.

Different levels of pitch, or speed of meaning—together with arbitrary levels of loopiness—contain different animals, from buzzing gnats to bullfrogs and big cats—different machines, different human and semi-human voices, different jungle/menagerie soundscapes—different musics—different meaning altogether—different whole worlds—from the vocal sound at room temperature, normal pitch—the sound from which it derives.

This is not your daddy's digital poetry or sound poetry.

Explore the concept. View six background colors to complete one revolution of the meanometer—speeded by interaction, especially zipFunk.

It's audio-centered but also visual music, color music. Use the “simple”/“complex” pair of diamond buttons to increase/decrease the width of the stripes—each of which represents a currently-playing sliver of sound. The width of the stripe is the sample's duration. Slivers can range from 0.001 seconds to 5 seconds.

Each of the 6 background colors has a different set of 30 palettes associated with it. Pressing 'x' is for 'previous palette', while 'c' is for 'next palette'. You'll then see info such as “Palette 10 has 5 colors”. Since the stripes are not fully opaque and they often overlap, that produces new colors not among the colors of the current palette.

The “simple”/“complex” diamond buttons decreases/increases the number of simultaneous slivers. The more sounds/stripes, the more complex the sound and visuals, in a sense.

But the complexity of 1-12 slivers has more varied music to it than the music in, say, 800-1000 slivers, which is a larger, more indistinct jungle/menagerie landscape of creatures. Whereas you get em up close with 1-12 slivers. Complexity of sound is not the same as complexity of music. Music is associated with distinctive patterning of sound. Past a point, the more sounds, the less distinct the sound is from what it is with one more sliver in it.

Mind, you can create 1000 slivers—I've done 1800—if your machine is skookum enough—though probably not if it's a mobile device. The “complex” button attempts to save maximalists from themselves by slowing down in its adding of slivers when your system begins to groan under the weight of many simultaneous slivers. You can still continue to max out. But you really gotta want it.

The enigma of meaning awaits.

Best with headphones.