The opera started with experiments to create an endless river of sound, to alchemically distill a “Rheingold”, the river Rhine’s gold, out of the prelude to Wagner’s opera “Das Rheingold”. It became a de-wagnerisation of the whole opera, which is part of his “Ring” cycle.
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What does help in contemporary cryptography, quantum mechanics and emancipated aesthetics is the notion of a random process and the use of the electronic brain. This leaves deterministic systems behind, as they are now described with probabilities. A probability of 100% is certainty, but the chance of this happening in the universe is remote. ”You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you get what you need.” So I followed the advice of physicists, cryptologists and rock royalty and applied it to a 2007 recording of Wagner's opera at Bayreuth, conducted by Thielman. I choose this one because the recording was very clean, free of surface noise, and had a wonderful and nuanced orchestral sound that is not overpowered by the vocals. And it is on YouTube.
These characteristics were important because of what I did to the recording, mathematically speaking. I divided the opera into 5 acts made up of Wagner’s 4 scenes, plus the famous prelude, as a separate act 0. In experiments with a electronic brain I now proceeded to randomly sample from each act and place the samples randomly within the length of each act. “I” literally chopped Wagner to pieces and then put the pieces back together without the I, the egocentricity of the 19th century, but with the cryptographically sound methods of the 21st.
The art of composition lay in the mathematical formula, in choosing the parameters of statistical methods.
How long should the samples be? How should they be distributed, what is the magical distribution? In order to find the answers, I deployed the proven sleepy hypnosis method. I asked when would I become hypnotized by the sonic experiment, this wall of sound in front of me? While listening intently, would I be able to leave this world and drift into a netherworld between awake and asleep? This would be an emancipated, a rheingold-ian, state indeed. The answer was a sample length between 0.4 and 14.04 seconds but beta distributed which favored shorter time spans.
Good, but the results smelled to much like statistical average.
The original recording was now atomized and the bits distributed evenly over the appropriate time spans while the harmonic language, the pitches of the samples remained unaltered, much like in my album “Beethoven No.9”. All was still equal temperament. Luckily the Csound function diskin2, which read the sound files in, had a parameter that also changes the pitch of the sample and this in degrees way smaller that 100 cents, the smallest interval in equal temperament. I set a random range between 0.8 and 1.1 and - deus ex machina - a completely new harmonic language emerged, vast and granular.
In the end I scaled the opera down to the magical 1 hour time span and there are now on average 13.33 events per second that pass by the listener; there are at least 13.33 harmonically modulated excerpts from Wagner’s “Rheingold” present in every second of the new “Rheingold”. This sounds like big data, yes, but only then did unanimated random bits turn into a animated force, a radically new and equal universe, probable in all directions and dimensions, free of the arrow of time.
