FUZZBALL

This Metaludio is entirely based on sequence A360521 from the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.  The OEIS has been an enormous source of inspiration and musical prime matter in my work.  The piece is dedicated to Neil Sloane, founder and chairman of the OEIS.

Sequence A360521 was added to the OEIS by Scott R. Shannon on Feb. 9, 2023.  Please refer to the OEIS website for more detailed information about the sequence. 

To create this piece, 10,000 terms were calculated and mapped to the range of a standard piano keyboard (0 to 88). The sequence was then reversed, starting from the 10,000th term and working its way back to the beginning. A MIDI file was generated from this data, with each note lasting 27 milliseconds, resulting in a total duration of approximately 4 minutes and 30 seconds. This piano part is designed to be performed in sync with pre-recorded electronics, which utilize all 10,000 notes, assigning them to various sounds and textures. The piano part is an adaptation of the original MIDI data, distilled to make it performable by a human.

The sequence's unique characteristics - its collapsing, grainy quality and its blend of chaotic and ordered behavior - inspired the title of the piece.  Fuzzballs are a theoretical concept in string theory that reimagines black holes as densely packed, grainy regions of spacetime, rather than voids bounded by event horizons.  The fuzzball proposal attempts to resolve the black hole information paradox by suggesting that the information that falls into a black hole isn't lost but is instead encoded in the microstructure of spacetime.