"I'll Wait" and "Dit Dit Dot"
I stumbled across this in the dim early days of the internet and have never been able to find it again. I was wondering if anyone here had come across it.
The site I'm thinking of was set up by a group of musicians and mathematicians if I remember correctly. It was standard 90's Geocities stuff: a plain black background with light lettering. I don't think it was actually ON Geocities though. Given the date it may have been hosted at a college or university. They were generating fractal equations, letting them create number sequences, then running those sequences through a program that translated them into midi files. Most of these files produced noise but some actually sounded like music. Being fractals they repeated endlessly in a pattern. What was really odd was that some of them seemed to have voices in them.
The voices were entirely unintentional, according to the site. Even the creators of the music were taken aback by this.
Two of the best examples given were "I'll Wait" and "Dit Dit Dot".
"I'll Wait" sounded like a kind of player piano: a string of tinkly music followed by a deep lull. During this lull (which also sounded like it had deep drums or beats in the background) a male, breathy, deep voice would then sing "I'lllll Waaaaaait". This voice sounded very artificial to me.
"Dit Dit Dot" was more jumpy and every now and then a voice would say "dot". I remember the voice sounded sort of British to me, if you can identify an accent based on one short word alone. It was timed so that it sounded like the voice was waiting two beats then repeating "dot", hence the name. The rhythm went: (one beat), dit, dit, "DOT!", over and over again.
Anyone remember this? And if so, does anyone have the recordings?
EDIT: Kylde sent me a link and I think I may have found a site on it that can help me find these files. There's no email link on that site but there is a comments section that was updated this year, so I send them the following message:
I'm wondering if you've ever encountered things in these recordings that sound like human voices? I remember finding something about this ages ago on the internet. I'm not talkiing about EVP but accidental voices generated by the numbers. More specifically, I'm seeking two songs: one called "I'll Wait" and another called "Dit Dit Dot". They were both generated using fractal equations put through a midi generator. I haven't seen either of these online in over 15 years but I was wondering if maybe you have? If you have those recordings, or know where I can find them, I'd love to hear more. Thanks for reading this!
I'll update here if I ever hear back from the site admin.
Posted May 29, 2016, 7:29 PM UTC · edited