At the dawn of civilisation

Notes and Neurons

There is a scientific explanation for the origins of music in these videos.

...and all this had nothing ever to do with time as measured by clocks. Not until now, that is.

With the advent of computers, the main problem seems to be a steadfast conviction held by most developers and hardware designers, that as far as time is concerned, mathematically divided clock time is as good as it needs to be. If you look at the computer only as a tool to run a web browser, word processor, database, spread-sheet or Global Positioning System , then continuously accurate (or natural) timing does not matter, only the accurate time of specific, set events, such as date-stamps of files is important.

However, if you look at it as a multimedia tool which should allow you to record and edit music or video at decent, glitchfree quality, then that accurate, and natural, timing does become vital. This means no resync at any time, no dropped frame, no added fill-in beat, but timing as `regular` as the teeth of two cog-wheels, which have to meet properly, in order to avoid breaking.

In music, we don't care at what exact time a certain currency has changed its value, or even what time the Shuttle has to take off on its scientific trip to rendez vous with Sky Lab - for those things it is best to refer to an atomic clock, to have accurate official time at any given moment. In music, what we do care about is the naturally accurate timing of an ongoing, repetitive and continuous process.

Video has its steady and accurately defined frame-rate, which was just what the Amiga was built for with its video friendly chipset that synchronised perfectly and happily with any VCR. In music, timing is at least as much, if not more important, so let us look at this accuracy of timing.

Most musicians will agree that music depends on feel, which in my own experience isn't clock-time based, or to put it in other words, it lives rather unhappily with clocks.

Music is based on the time of the universe, on the timing of our planets as they sweep majestically around the Sun, and on the actual timing of our Earth as it revolves around its own polar axis during that sweep - see synchronous orbit. This may sound grand, or even grandiose, but let's look at it more closely.

These large scale motions are perfectly in sync with, and interdependent on the motion of the atoms that make up a resonating string, a tube of wood or brass, or even our human voice cords, not to forget the molecules and atoms of the air itself, which carries these vibrations to our ears. And it is those atoms which the beat of our hearts has to be in sync with.

As we well know, this issue of time can never been fully resolved; take our arbitrary choice of 60 seconds to a minute, 24 hours to the day and 365 days to a year,

but then there are the years when a day has to be added in order to synchronise the two disparate ways of timing. So now we have leap-years, but even the existence of those doesn't make the necessary equalisation accurate enough, so every now and then, that additional leap-year day has to be ignored.

Yeah, right! So where is the accuracy in that? Can this arbitrary shifting of days be regarded as natural? Some might say that it only happens every four years - but that is wrong too. That additional day, every four years, is in reality a compromise, made up of fractions of seconds which will gradually accumulate, second by second, hour after hour, until that full day has been added up. So we are really talking about an extra six hours every year or a minute or so, every day.

A mere minute a day should not appear long enough to give us any cause to worry, or could it?

Try to say "one-two-thousand" - this timespan can and will be be noticed in a piece of music, even when we divide it by 24 and then again by 60, to get its actual length for every minute of the day. As a result, we have what makes up the discrepancy between universal time, or UTC, a mathematically derived clock time, the arbitrary time of human science and commerce, and the "Time of the Universe", which syncs with our heart-beat.

Although that fraction of a second is a very short time-span, it will throw the beat of our song out of synch where our software has to skip a fraction of a beat. And that will be noticed! Noticed not only

by musicians who are expected to give us the 'Music of the Spheres' (again it is stars and planets that are being referenced here, not clocks), but noticed by anyone.

Musicians have to be attuned to the planet, which is actually slowing its rotation, and to the resonance of atoms in some hardware. They do this by feel, due to the fact that our bodies are made up of atoms, which are in sync with the planet we live on. To fix any music recording timer to even a 1/50 of this arbitrary number called a 'second', is a restriction that clashes with the natural feel of music. Either the sequencer software will be out of sync with the musician or the musician will be out of sync with the software.

Imagine a sequencer that keeps resynching while you record or play, skipping or dropping the odd beat of its metronome every few bars.

It would sound pretty awful when replaying previously recorded music too, not just while recording.

The old Bars & Pipes Pro, which is tied to the audio chip and hardware, is still behaving like a realtime sequencer should. It may not be the most modern of programs to look at, but it is in tune with hardware time and never skips a beat. Both MIDI and audio run perfectly synchronised - even in sync with the musician, all timed by hardware.

Never a hitch, never a dropped frame or skipped beat, just smooth and even performance, even when we multitask a browser and file transfers.

Attuned to the electrons as they travel through the chipset, attuned to the planet's gravity and rotation, perfectly in harmony with the laws of physics. Those electrons are what the universe and all of us are connected by, those are our natural internal timers, our hearts will beat according to those electrons, not according to some mathematically arrived at time fragments.

So in order to stay in sync with ourselves, let's try and stick to hardware timing of musical events, which is how the Amiga - and NatAmi hopefully - are designed to function. As the display runs by frame refresh, tie the audio to the same timing, and we have perfect sync of the media.

Remember those old demos * where perfectly smooth graphic animation was in seamless and absolute sync with the music? No rubber-band effect, no stutter.

* Note: Most of these demos were recorded in WinUAE, an Amiga Emulator, so they will be less accurate than when running on the actual hardware. Compressing the resulting video can also cause additional deterioration of quality.