When a research project takes over my life, it usually ends up as a song. Lately each of those songs gets a music video in the style of the demoscene: everything drawn by code, nothing filmed.
The songs
Lumens Per Watt is about my factoring experiment and the person who kept running it. Its video is strict black and white, one bit per pixel, the way old demos had to work.
Laser Beam is about obsessive focus: researching something past the point of sense and publishing it anyway. It’s haunted 1960s psych-pop with barbershop harmonies and a pipe organ, and the video is haunted to match.
Ten Times, Not a Hundred reports what the experiment actually found, a real improvement but a modest one, as electronic pop with robot boy-band vocals and a barbershop quartet.
Light Through the Holes tells the story of my book on sieves as hard synth-rock with vocoder vocals.
How they’re made
To be clear about process: these songs are made with Suno, an AI music tool, from my own lyrics and direction. The videos are programs. Each one is written in code that renders every frame from the audio, and the source goes up on GitHub. The demoscene has always been about making pictures out of math under tight limits, which suits songs about math.
Watch: my YouTube channel
Hear the rest: ONOJK Radio
