Driving to Gogo (23rd of October 2010)

Press play in the window above to start streaming from YouTube. It is a visualization of my composition "Driving to Gogo". This video should be viewed using earphones or high-quality speakers. Due to specific properties of the sound in this piece, the laptop or typical, low quality desktop speakers will give a false impression. You'll also need a good browser and Flash plugin in order to avoid crancky behaviour of YouTube video.

"Driving to Gogo" is one of my early, completely digital audio creations, and perhaps, after all which I have made, one of the most successful. As with every creative work, sometimes everything clicks into place and the author is not completely aware neither how nor why it happened. And sometimes, in spite of all the invested effort, nothing happens or only a feeble result appears. The reasons are difficult to disentangle; perhaps they lie in subtle elements from the surrounding. One cannot create just anywhere, a creative work needs special conditions. It is not a coincidence that painters, writers, musicians, but also scientists who could afford it, often ran away to places where they could work, places that inspired them ...

When the composition was finished, I immediately thought of some kind of driving, in the music I heard some kind of motion, distancing, repetitive tiling of time with patterns, as in a train or similar. That is where the "driving" in the composition title comes from. I concluded that this element must also be preserved in the visualization of the music. That is what I did.

The video for the music represents driving through a long tunnel.

The tunnel is a metaphor for life: we do not exactly remember when we got in, we do not exactly know where the end is, and the light bulbs pass one after another; the signs on the tunnel walls, the warning lights, every time something slightly different, yet after a few kilometers, every time so familiar... We are driving.

It is almost certainly NOT a coincidence that one of the best existential novels I read (The Stranger is of course off the chart in this respect) is called The Tunnel (by >> Ernesto Sabato; Sabato obtained PhD in physics, published one paper in Physical Review, and left physics altogheter after that - of course, I had to read his Phys. Rev. paper after reading The Tunnel - I think he made a good decision).

And in the driving through the tunnel, everything seems to be in order. Automobile is running smoothly, easily wins the turns, everything passes calmly and securely. The curves change, left than right, and it seems as if the driving could last for long, long time.

The video contains 6000 images like the two above. The calculation was long and it took more than a week. That is why I dropped certain elements where I could obtain more realistic results with additional calculations. It would simply last too long, I already got fed up with the buzz from the kitchen (that is where the computer was situated for this occasion).

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Last updated on 23rd of October 2010.