25th September, my 'day of rebrith'. In 2008 on this day I woke up with a different personality, changed instantly overnight. My early childhood was as 'normal' as any, but at around the age of 10 I withdraw from social life, became silent, emotionless and focused on my internal intellectual tasks, and my new computer obsession. I had friends at shcool, but these were more like colleagues and I felt less and less connection with anyone, except my machine, my programming, my solemn work. I attended college for 2 years and interacted with no-one except the only friend I knew from school, Paul Challinor, who was as equally quiet as I.
From 18 to 36 I didn't speak, had no social contact, and felt almost no emotions; no happiness or sadness, but my Spock-like existence ended on the 25th September 2008, when, thanks to art and the new social experiences of my first art club, everything flooded back in an instant; a quantum leap which had been slowly growing in the preceding weeks. On that day I felt only joy, colours glowed brighter than ever, and it was the start of a new learning, a huge change to my personality. Even the slightest thing could affect me hugely deeply; I found myself crying in front of advertisements, or simply overwhelmed by the slightest thing. Films or music were too much, even mild horror films completely terrifying.
As I emerged from my years of silence, ancient memories of childhood returned. I found 'new' parents, a second set of beloved parents in contrast to the cold automatons of my 'actual' parents. As a child, I used to think that my parents were androids, aliens controlled by malevolent forces. These robots looked like my parents, but they weren't, they were evil minions of a greater power who had kidnapped my real parents and imprisoned them behind the walls of the house. I could see them tied to chairs, gagged and pleading for my help. I had to do the right things or the androids would harm them. I had forgotten all of this until 2008, when those memories, and many more returned.
This at least proved to me that emotions exist only for social interaction, for gaining instant knowledge of others' motivations, but 'others' can also include inanimate objects; thus emotions are ultimately a complex form of parallel processing. A feeling can convey a lot of logical information in an instant, but they evolved and primarily exist for judging others and situations, for reasons of survival.
I've completed some backups this morning. I normally do this every three months, but wanted an early start as I'm nearing the end of the Salome project and have upgraded Prometheus a lot recently. I've stopped feeling like an artist, my genius is stifled, frustrated. I must do more! Life is short.
I've read today about dithering in regard to digital audio bit conversion and realised that I really need to add some to Prometheus. This, like the Spectrum Analysis options added in February and the new Limiter, continues my exploration of mastering. In practice, my music has been dithered for some time anyway, as I export in float format now (the option was added in April 2017) and use Sony CD Architect for mastering, which has dithering built-in.
I did wonder if dithering could be beneficial in time/frequency as well as amplitude. It seems logical that a sample between two others could be chosen at a random point; eg. given 15, 70, 80 then the 70 sample could be anywhere on the lines drawn between 15 to 70, and 70 to 80; perhaps centred halfway to favour numbers near 70. This might not be needed or useful, however.
I need to set these time consuming researches aside and create, but this is easier said than done. Tomorrow I will, however, revisit Heart of Snow.
