The Art of Destruction (and the destruction of art).
One night in 2001, William Basinski sat on the rooftop of his apartment building in New York. I can only assume he was pretty tired. He had spent the whole night working on a project and was resting looking on as two planes crashed into the world trade center.
The project he was working on, which now seemed weirdly, ominously, predictive, was the documentation of the destruction of some musical loops he had recorded years before. He noticed that after playing the recording tapes in his tape player, the crackling sound intensified, and the sound lost some of its brightness. He went on to let the tape play to its inevitable demise, recording the process of loss.
The rest of that day was chaotic. William spent the day on his roof, filming and documenting more loss.
Claude Elwood Shannon surrounded by white noise
Everything is destroyed. Nothing last. Order is fragile, and it doesn’t require a lot of perturbations to get distorted until it’s no longer recognizable. Claude Elwood Shannon brought forth one way to describe this divergence from the order, at least in the realm of information. Shannon calculated a measure for knowledge, for information. He devised a measure called entropy which is 0 when we know everything when we can’t be surprised, where each event has but one likely outcome and one that rises as uncertainty about the outcome rise.
For instance, let's think about noise. White noise is a term that means that any sound, any note, is as likely to be played as another.
To use Shannon’s entropy to quantify the information we have in white noise, we need to observe three rules:
We have to have a fixed “support” for the range of information we care about. In this case, of sound, trivial support would be the 12 semitones.
We need to set and keep constant bins upon which the probability of a note played will be determined.
We need a constant sample size to compare probabilities. In our case, a given length of measurement should suffice.
So what does white noise look like in those parameters?
It has an entropy of 3.5819 bits. This is calculated by first analyzing the frequency spectrum of the white noise. For each semitone in our pre-defined range, we count the number of frequencies that fall within that semitone's range. This count is then divided by the total count of all frequencies to obtain the probability of each semitone occurring. To calculate the entropy, we sum up the products of the probability of each semitone and the logarithm of its probability. This gives us a measure of the uncertainty or 'surprise' in the white noise signal.
But why do we care about all of this? We want to know about the order. We want to know about the surprise. The tape that got disorganized that night when the planes were making their way into William Basinski's line of sight was one of a trumpet. It was old and weird and sounded like this:
It is hauntingly beautiful precisely because it plays so familiar and so unearthly at the same time. In dlp 1.1, it is played over and over for 63 minutes. Here is what the waveform of the first four repeats looks like:
I want to see the actual deterioration of this signal as the tape was forever losing any information that was played on that trumpet forever ago. So I plotted the Shannon entropy for each segment as time went on:
The first 8 minutes describe precisely the destruction one might expect from such a process. Entropy rises almost linearly and then saturates but what exactly is happening? this is how things look at minute 8:
compared to the first minute:
Can you hear the difference?
This makes sense so far. The sound becomes much less organized and much more crackling, erroneous notes as the result of the loss of meaning. But then something else happens.
At minute 39, entropy reaches almost the beginning levels of entropy followed by an immediate jump to much higher entropy. Highest than we ever heard before:
Minute 39 (Top) and minute 45 (bottom)
So what is effectively happening here is that a signal, a melody, is added. On top of the ruins of the ancient trumpet, a new beautiful sound is built. So what are the differences between those two rises of entropy? The rise of decay and the rise of construction.
Well, destruction is stochastic. Unpredictable. Construction is usually designed. If we want to see this “plan,” we can look at the distance (EMD) between each segment and the next loop.
What’s going on? For the first part, the part of destruction, the distance rises with the disorder, and every loop moves slightly away from the previous loop at a continuous rate. This is an uncontrollable, diffusible change. But the designed part is different. There the distance diminishes with the rise of entropy as each following segment becomes both broad and similar to its predecessor.
The order that does rise rises upon the ruins of the old. Using the leftovers as a substrate to supplement something new. I am fascinated by this.
This is one of the cornerstones of one of the most intriguing adaptive mechanisms life has to offer, Hsp90. This protein is incredibly prevalent and conserved, and it serves a dual function. It is what is known as a chaperone. It guides other cell machinery to behave, act in a civilized manner, and preserve its function. It is a force of conservation and maintenance, but this is changed under fire.
When stress rises, Hsp90 neglects its chaperoning duties. It becomes highly focused on certain key features crucial for life survival, manding the sails as the ships burn. But manding the sails is imperative. It may lead the ship to the coast. In other words, it allows the cell to try and solve the problems it is currently facing while the basic functions are protected.
But how can the cell solve something which is essentially unsolvable? Rember those proteins? Slaving away chaperoned and trained? They are now deprived of guidance and are left to their own devices. They start to change, to raise the disorder and entropy, trying all paths and avenues to make the fire stop.
And sometimes, one succeeds. The new thing he tried works. The lack of guidance allowed it to emerge as a new signal. Upon the ruins of the old regulatory network, a new capability arises, Saving the whole burning ship.
Life playes on the boundary of order and disorder. Harnessing the grind of the everyday to develop robustness and endurance to propagate. But everything fails, and some failures are spectacular. When such a failure occurs, nothing no longer works, and life needs to try something new, to break the order and, from all of the half solutions, build something new.
