Dons the hat. Amazing story, thanks for sharing some insights here.
The “A Sign in Space” message has a lot of similarity to music as a form of message communication. Computational irreducibility can be understood in more human terms through the lens of Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism of the 1960s: :“The medium is the message.” which morphed into “The medium is the massage”. More or less, the meaning of the ASIS message is the block cellular automata computational process, not by what it reveals. Music is very much like that. The song is the message and the meaning. The message changes us just by the act of listening to it or viewing it. It “massages” the listener.
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I’m probably getting too philosophical and abstract here, but I think we could safely say that VCV Rack is the medium and the medium is the message. We participate in the creations and experiences that are possible through this medium. We create modules and patches as well as use others’ modules and patches. And, we are changed in the process.
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Well Ken, I love this patch so much I had to take a look at it. I found that the “04” track was clipping on the mixer and the record level knob was way too high. I rectified that whilst keeping the inter-track balance of course.
Also, the top-right Chronoblob was completely unused and I took the liberty of cleaning up the patch a little bit. Here’s the version of the patch that doesn’t clip:
A Sign In Space-6625 steps (no-clipping).vcv (14.2 KB)
I think you can make a good recording from that.
I made a recording of it and confirmed no clipping in the .wav file. Here’s the mp3 version of that:
You can grab the .wav file here if you’d like.
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Thanks Lars. Thanks for catching the record level setting problem. I totally overlooked that when I corrected the several types of distortions I found. I think some of them were aliasing problems but I am not certain as I got rid of the problem without really confirming the exact source. A general recording question since I am not a recording engineer is what should be avoided. Obviously, it the channel level is showing red there is going to be clipping. What about if it occasionally shows yellow? Should all yellow levels be avoided also?
I’m not a perfectionist in any of my endeavors so I have a high tolerance for imperfection. Thank you though for taking the time to troubleshoot these issues. I will download your patch and play with it. I may re-record the piece or not. I probably will since I also like this patch and song a lot.
By the way, my selection file that I use in place of a patch template has stuff in it that may not be used in specific patches, as wes the case of the Chronoblob delay.
This piece is a very good example of my approach to generative minimalist music founded on modal scales and the circle-of-fifths. For each of my favorite modules, I map out the the parametric control CVs required to achieve the desired parameter value. I sometimes refer to these as eigenvalues, which they loosely are. So, I have sequencers CV sequencing sequencers.
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Yes, your changes to the patch sound very good. I will re-record the song for SoundCloud. Thanks again for taking the time to improve my patch ans recording.
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I should probably explain my cavilier attitude about imperfections. Whereas I called this patch and song a “documentary” of the ASIS decoding, that is a very loose and imprecise description. My CNN video is part of the ASIS project decoding history, but anything else I do is in an “interpretive” sense. My SoundCloud music does not literally tie back in to the ASIS project, so the patch and song are just my interpretation of how to use music to interpret the message, in an artistic context… The actual decoding required on the order of 8 billion lines of C# code in Unity be executed to transform the received “starmap” image into the 5 amino acids image. The sheer amount of data to try to capture via video or sound is essentially intractable. So, this Rack patch was an attempt to capture the crude experience of the decoding but in a musically pleasing manner that has nothing to do with the message or decoding other than by approximate tempo and note count.
I have another SoundCloud ASIS interpretation where I used pachde Imagine to read the amino acids image like a phonograph record and interpret the pixels as various types of sounds. This worked but is totally non-musical. But, if you would like to hear the result see:
I did this the same week that I created the ASIS video in November, 2024 when the CNN article posted. It is tough to do any type of musical interpretation that both sounds good and actually reflects the message data in some way. I just used the single amino acid image for this and ignored the other 6624 images that emerge as the starmap is transformed to the amino acids and all of the other frames which could be on the order of 2^300,000 unique images of the finite state machine Poincare recurrence cycle if due to pure chance only.
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And another bit silly excuse for imperfections is my comment on the lack of error detection or correction in the ASIS image once received. If there had been a single bit error in the received message, the amino acids image would not have been able to be retrieved from the message.
In reality, error checksums and correction are built into the Exo-Mars probe telemetry system and the ASIS team confirmed that the received message exactly matched what was transmitted from Earth to Mars earlier in the day.
A real message would most likely use repeats of the message for error correction purposes as happened in the Contact movie and novel.
Interestingly, the header and perhaps the footer has some row and column checksums that could be used to correct a very few errors in the header and footer. There is no identified way to do this for the full 256x256 pixel/bit image.
Also, the signal was received by at least 3 radio telescopes on Earth and one citizen decoder had prepared code to cross-correlate the 3 signals for error correction had that been necessary, but it was not necessary.
The scope and complexity of this project is absolutely mind-boggling.
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Lastly, if anyone is interested in this type of thing, the block cellular automata computationally irreducible decoding is the same way crypto blockchain decoding or decryption is done. There are no shortcuts to decoding the blockchain and doing so is the “proof of work” at the heart of block chain security.
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I couldn’t help myself - I think this piece needs some extra special polish. It was a pretty mono patch, with quite some mud and buildup of certain frequencies. So I dug in, killed the DC, worked the EQ, did some panning, adjusted the reverbs and here’s the result:
A Sign In Space-6625 steps (more-polish).vcv (14.1 KB)
It’s as good as I can make it and I definately prefer this version. MP3 recording here:
And the .wav is here.
I promise I’ll leave it alone now 
For a good result I’d say yes. Just keep it under 0db at all times.
And I absolutely love that kind!
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The ASIS message is all about emergent complexity. I love the idea of others modifying this patch and recording and making it their own or leaving it wild as each sees fit.
Good job.
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I don’t think I explained this, but one of my favorite minimalist tropes is to stay on a single chord in the I position for the entire song. This does not mean the chord is static. I call this “Stay on I”. In this case the chord is a Bm in the B Aeolian mode. Meander lets the chord meander through inversions and octaves. The chord feeds sequential switches which more or less arpeggiate the chord. In addition the Meander melody section can build melodies made up of chord notes or scale notes as can the Meander Arp section. LLFOs switch those melody states as well as switching Meander arp on and off. Meander outputs 1ms trigger at musical notes intervals such as 1/4 and 1/8 etc. These can be uses as sequential switch clocks or run into the Bogaudio DGATE to create a variable gate signal for envelope control.
I just thought I would mention this as it can be very difficult to figure out what a complex patch is doing.
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It’s a great approach and right up my street, and as you say, orchestrating that simplicity can get a bit complex I have a feeling we both love the heritage of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. This one is probably more Glass. I have a crazy French friend that takes it to the extreme.
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You hit the nail on the head or the note on the beat. When I first was working on this patch sometime in the last week or two, I asked myself what minimalist music most reminds me of the ASIS block cellular automata evolution. I decided on Philip Glass’ “koyaanisqatsi” soundtrack! When I was in college back in the early 70s, I was introduced to the music of Terry Riley and Steve Reich probably somewhat before I built my PAIA modular synth from kits in about 1973. I was also introduced to the music of Walter/Wendy Carlos somewhat before any of these, most memorably “A Clockwork Orange” movie soundtrack. I cannot remember when I was introduced to music of Philip Glass. By the time koyanisqatsi came out, I had an Apple II+ computer and had started doing my own electronic music combining my modular synth and the Apple in crazy ways as there was no such thing as MIDI then, or at least not as far as I knew…
I think I have told the story before that in the late 60s one of my high school buddies told me about seeing some fantastic new musical instrument on TV. He said it was a “mood synthesizer”. Well, that is what I heard. He really just mispronounced Moog. We had this conversation where I was talking about synthesizing moods with music and he was still talking about Moog and it took me years to realize that that entire conversation we were talking about the same thing but in such a way that neither one of us realized we were not talking about the same word;).
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Nice Mood/Moog story
Yeah, the Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack made quite an impression on me as well. It was like the Interstellar sound track (which I love as well) of its time. The time I seriously got hooked was when I heard Christoffer Franke’s lovely, minimalist sequencing in Tangerine Dream, back in the late 70’s. That was a revelation. I always return to things like “Tones, Drones and Arpeggios: The Magic of Minimalism” (Episode 1, Episode 2) when I need to be reminded of what it’s all about, and to revitalise musical inspiration.
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I was also heavily influenced by rock music’s use of synths. Todd Rundgren’s 1975 album “Initiation” track “I was born to synthesize” has been my theme song since I first heard it then. Emerson, Lake and Palmer were also big influences for me.
Modular synthesis can be a life-long spiritual journey, in my experienced opinion. I learned to patch my PAiA modular synth in dreams before I finished building it. Literally!
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Definately, ditto. I listened to a lot of ELP too. One of my favorite rock synths from Journey (1975) - I Would Find You.
Definately. I would probably slightly rewrite, or abstract, and say something like: “Minimalism seems to be especially amenable to having a spiritual component, if you would perceive it as such.”.
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And, I definitely did not mean spirituality in a religious sense, although some people do find that. I think of it more as a mystical experience, but sometimes an experience of “pure thought”. It is very amenable to building an abstract mental simulation that can be explored, one step removed from the physical world. It can induce an altered state of thinking and feeling, that are hard to describe as they are so subjective.
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Here is the final mix of my “A Sign In Space” musical interpretation documenting the message decoding process. For this, I kept my patch and made some of Lars’ mixing suggestions. It does sound much better now. Thanks Lars.
A Sign In Space-6625 steps w Echo Bmin Stay on 1.vcv (15.5 KB)
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Beautiful!
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