Triple Piano Progress Report

Hello good humans!

I am still so excited for this video. It might not be finished this month, so I thought I'd tell you a little more about it.

The basic idea is, I sing a three part round with myself in a tripled spherical space, and the video has a symmetry where if you move forward in time 20 seconds and rotate the sphere 120 degrees it is the same (with some small variations, as human performances tend to have).

If that were all, it would've taken a day or two to edit the video, but the symmetry is too interesting to leave it at that. Henry and I share a particular ambition when it comes to symmetry groups. 

And in this case, we're creating an infinitely spiraling spherical "time crystal" (a term for symmetry groups that have both space and time components, coined by physicist Sabetta Matsumoto). We are unaware of any works that explore this kind of symmetry. So beyond merely having three separate sections of the sphere that don't interact, we chose to showcase the peculiar possibilities of this symmetry group when sections interact. It's like the difference between a tiling of squares and an Escher print of interlocking lizards.

I appear three times at all times as one would expect, but I find different ways to interact with my other selves. A single piece of sheet music gets passed around between different sections of time and space.  Two hammers gets passed in the other direction (making 266 hammers in all if you count the tripled piano), slightly out of sync with two Henries circling in that same direction. 

Beyond the challenges of filming and editing "clone" effects (which I have never done before), we had to figure out the possibilities of interactions between things that travel through time and space a little differently from each other, and that loop in both time and space. It was mind bending to choreograph, as we could not help but want to showcase multiple consequences of the symmetry in the video. I hope you'll enjoy trying to catch them all and figure them out!

Of course, this creates an editing nightmare. Not just figuring out how to do the effects and then the often tedious process of implementing them, but working with huge video files in many layers makes the editing software run really slow and crash frequently. When we were planning it, every individual thing we thought of doing I confidently told Henry I could figure out how to make work in editing. I may have slightly underestimated the compounding effects on the software, though, and how quickly these things add up...

A couple times I had to give up on a couple days work and approach something in a new way that would cause my poor Macbook Pro and Premiere less trouble. It's amazing how much longer editing takes when even simple user actions like clicking to another part of the timeline often takes a few seconds to manifest! And the difference between working with separate clips, which can be individually dealt with, and something that simulates a continuous shot over 5 minutes with so much loopiness. 

I love the challenge, and all the editing troubles deepen my understanding and appreciation for the symmetry group. Many of the little "bugs" that pop up reveal an aspect of the symmetry that I did not understand as well as I thought I did. I could probably be less of a perfectionist with some of the effects, but given how much time and effort we've spent on this, it would be a shame to distract the viewer with seams and flaws rather than allowing them the pleasure of trying to figure it out how it all works.

So thank you for giving me the time to be so thorough! Not many creators are given the support it takes to do things right.

Still, I miss the $20,000 machine we got back in our CDG/SAP days... hundreds of spherical videos at high resolutions went through that machine and would render instantly. Now I've got to let my computer render overnight every time I want to see whether a simple change actually worked, as the video preview refuses to cooperate with the effects. So while I'm hoping to use some of the new editing skills I'm learning in future videos, I'll probably do something less ambitious editing-wise next time. I don't plan to do enough of this kind of editing to justify obtaining a machine of that caliber.

Plus, we're actually working on two videos at once and plan to release them at the same time. One is a "making of" video that will appear on Henry's channel and explain some of the mathematics, effects, and challenges. Henry has some real cool graphics that help explain some of the math.

So including that video, on average things are taking as long as usual for a video. And I'm simultaneously putting some work into another related video, code name "Imperfection", that I'll talk more about if it gets further along. 

I'm excited about all of these videos, no matter how long they take, because exploring this "time crystal" has been very satisfying to me. Not just a repetition in time, or interacting with past selves, not just a loop in time or space, but both---with a spiraling offset that makes it difficult to reduce to just one or the other! I know that many other people will also enjoy the opportunity to stretch their mind in this particular way.

My apologies if I haven't explained particularly well... the videos will do a much better job, I hope!

In other news, life is good. Thank you so so much for your generous support and response to my previous post regarding burnout and not working all the time. It's doing wonders for my brain bits!

And if you're looking for something to watch in the mean time, check out Henry's other recent collaboration, with artist Alexa Meade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EahZSQmcs_s

Ok back to work!

Vi