Towards Hypermusic

from the menu/poems and mouse games embedded in the story. Digital Blood is the story of two friends, An (a researcher in benign virus/agent production) and Lin (an intelligent in­ terface designer), both recent mothers who are taking some time off from work to care for and get to know their infants. To amuse themselves, they elaborate on each other's computer work. Lin creates surreal interfaces for An's viruses—mak­ ing her machine sing and shout. An cre­ ates viruses that cause Lin's interfaces to evolve during use and to feel alive. After months of this, as their game gets more and more intense and they make use of what their babies are teach­ ing them, they start losing control of their computers. They finally realize that there is another entity inhabiting their systems. In the game, they have created an independent, evolving construct that one would have to say is living. Is this a threat to be destroyed or a treasure to be cherished and nurtured? Digital Blood: Part 0 was shown at the opening of the Mill Valley Film Festival, October 1997. Note 1. Digital Blond: Part 0 was created on a Power Macintosh 9500 computer using Director, Photoshop, SoundEdit, Strata Studio Pro and Pre­ miere software. TOWARDS HYPERMUSIC John Maxwell Hobbs, 75 Leonard Street 5NE, New York, NY 10013, U.S.A. E-mail: . Web site: . Experience While connecting to the Internet, the screaming of two modems arguing about their handshaking protocols finally stops when they come to an agreement. The modem speaker is turned off, but the mo­ dem continues to translate digital infor­ mation into an acoustic signal: music for machines, perhaps. It is odd that such an energetic acoustic experience should begin such an unusually silent experi­ ence. Bits come streaming down the line from a huge data cloud. They get sorted into containers; the contents of the containers get identified and things begin to coalesce. The screen blazes with activity; there are moving images of fire, waterfalls, birds, danc­ ing mailboxes and more, but some­ thing is very wrong. Silence fills the air; it has almost palpable weight. It is pos­ sible to slip an audio compact disc into the CD-ROM drive and play some pre­ recorded music, but the result is a very disconnected experience. A quick search on the word "sound" produces links to words and pictures about sound. Digging deeper, some of these words about sound lead to containers of actual sound. A sound is selected. A long time passes. The download is fi­ nally completed. The sound plays. This feels better for a moment, but some­ how it is ultimately unsatisfying in the present context. All the other informa­ tion presented can be navigated. Text leads to other text, text leads to im­ ages, images lead to images, images lead to text, endlessly. Images illustrate text; text illuminates images. The sound leads nowhere. It plays from be­ ginning to end and stops. It seems to exist as an object from another dimen­ sion, merely intersecting with this world without end, not merging with it. Travel through the data cloud re­ veals other options. Some sounds are delivered in streams that begin to play almost at once. Some of these streams allow the user to move forward and backward in the stream, in a sense, time traveling. This is not the level of interactivity desired, but it is a move in the right direction. Almost by acci­ dent, a new approach is stumbled upon—a page that contains text, im­ age and sound. The sound starts auto­ matically and plays while the document is read. This is both a step forward and a step backward. The sound is partially integrated, but func­ tions only as background music. It can­ not be manipulated, and it leads nowhere. It is a frozen experience, lacking the dynamic qualities of the other information on the page. As various approaches are explored and discarded, the density of the de­ sired information in the data cloud gets thin. It will take the sensing ability of a shark to detect one bit in billions. The search for the word "sound" reveals...