Dubby Grooves

Modulations and Dubby Grooves

by Douglas Robert Turek

Synthesis. Our best music, maybe even our best art, comes from two disparate elements uniting and changing one another into something else, like rock ‘n roll. Like waves in a pool bouncing back and forth, modulating one another until the surface has that rippled almost sculpted look with those intricate patterns, very geometric, very mathematical.

I was on my 7th run from Oort Station 11 to the outer edge of the heliosphere to cull more broadcasts; a three week run. I didn't know what I would get, shifting through the usual frequencies, maybe some fresh music and voices from the stars or just some of their endlessly enthusiastic bounce-back, rippled with static and the imprint of how-many suns, despite the fact that our best analysis said they were definitely boosting the signal a lot before sending it back. There were never any hidden messages, subcode, parallel code coming in on another frequency, or anything stuffed into the least significant bits. They were, stunningly enough, apparently just trying to get our attention and swap broadcasts. We were doing our best to collect what we could from the ether, and get going on our own part of the equation, though we had been doing that unwittingly since the early 20th century.

My first run, a few years back, I got all bounce-back. They heard us and sent that stuff right back at us, and I managed to get a Package. A Package is when you get a program full of broadcasts that have been edited down into one unit, and then sent repeatedly, usually for a few days, on a variety of frequencies. My first Package was a hodepodge of thirties radio and fifties television, from about 1931 to 1957. They howled when I brought that back, because it added fuel to the fire. There was a debate about how long we had been listened to. 1931 still stands as the earliest year bounced back. I even got my name in the 'casts that time, and a newsgroup all about my Package. I had hoped to have a cull of fresh stuff on my first run, but that came eventually.

Editing. The very process of editing, tampering, changing or filtering is a creative process, hence its danger. If editing takes over too much, it surpasses the original work and transcends editing. It’s a bit similar to William S. Burroughs’ legendary cut-up technique. The cutting and trimming and stitching and hemming of a written work can transform what was once a perfectly good piece of fabric into a shirt. A shirt is fine, for sure, but if the artists intent was to present a tapestry, then the addition of sleeves is not just superfluous but counterproductive. Like taking the Mona Lisa and making it into a coffee table. No one is saying that coffee tables are in and of themselves bad, but if you made La Gioconde into one, you would have a world of art lovers and historians wanting to hang you by the neck. When it comes to our radio neighbors, there are more questions than answers. They send things to us out of order and scattered, like they are easing us into our own past. Gives me a weird feeling, but then I get as many feelings as experts have theories. Neither amount to much at this point. There are times in history when you know great things are afoot, but not yet complete. It’s hard to get a handle on things at those times.

All of their broadcasts were sent in edited packages. In a way, it meant sense; I think I might have done it that way if I were on the other end, being the person getting ready to send back to a civilization their radio refuse. They also don’t send a package where the content isn’t put into non-chronological order. Clever trick, that. They make sure we don’t think it’s some natural phenomena. Clean it up, make it nice and shiny, cut it up into bite-size pieces and send it back from whence it came. Best way to get someone’s attention. Everyone I know likes the sound of their own voice better than some unknown sound lost in a crowd, and when the crowd is every radio source in the galaxy crammed into a busy electromagnetic spectrum, it’s far too easy to simply not hear anything in the first place. Editing, though, is more than just efficiency.

We never got any video of what they looked like. Whether they were hiding what they looked like or remained perplexed as to how cameras worked was another unanswered question. I did once get an insight as to why they might not send video. I was having lunch with Hima, my lab partner and eventually my best friend during college.
"So no video. Why?" I was puzzled. To my mind, I thought they’d want to show themselves.
"Can't show anything living." said Hima.
"What?" I said
"Maybe they cannot depict life. It may be their artistic tradition to not make graven images, or any images. In Islam, you can't depict life, so no portraits. Maybe our radio neighbors are like that. It could be a religious injunction, like in Islam." Hima smiled and sipped his tea, evidently pleased with his insight.
"Would that be applicable to video signals? Recording is different from making an image from scratch."
"They‘re aliens, man. Maybe they don’t see any difference. It could be like Islam, but maybe it’s even stricter."
"I see," I said, though I then gave away that I did not. "I thought, though, that it was just some rule against depicting humans. Aren't we too sacred, too close to God? Or is it to prevent messing with the image of Mohammed?"
"No, I think the real heart of the issue is that creating life is God's realm. No trespassing against his creative turf. You do that, you elevate yourself to the level of God. Lack of desecration is just a bonus. That's why Arabic art and architecture always have those intricate patterns, very geometric, very mathematical."
"Yeah, I’ve seen that kind of thing," I said.
"Probably no coincidence they invented algebra." Hima was on a roll. What he said stuck with me, though I never did check it out, I have heard similar things since then. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise, that injunction, if it led to algebra. I can't help but wonder if something similar had happened with our radio neighbors or if they were perhaps just blind. Either way, we were left with just their sounds.

Ships were based at the various stations at the outer fringes of the Oort cloud. The first stations were unmanned telescopes. When cheaper fusion drives came along, like FAPS propulsion, the first manned stations appeared. While there has been some amazing radiotelescopy and optical astronomy done from Earthside or from Earth orbit, nothing compares to the clarity you get when you are posited outside all of the physical detritus of the solar system. There’s also minimal solar interference. Cutting down on interference is the main reason to be out here.

The first of the Oort Stations was cofinanced by a mining concern. They were laughed at when they did that, but now that we are finally seeing rivers flow again on Mars, nobody’s laughing now. The same station I usually get assigned to, Number 11, is also the site of the IceCube Project. You’ve heard of it. They are actually going to drill a reusable FAPS system into one of the larger precometary ice chunks out here and fly it in rather than do the costly push-and-tow they’ve been doing for years. I approve, by the way. It’s safer, despite the fusion bombs they put into ice chunks that get pushed in and picked up later. Always better to have humans involved. That’s why I have a job as a pilot, rather than just monitoring a ship from remote. The amount of ships lost because the heuristic systems in charge freaked out and couldn’t deal with dirty ice or staggered radio reflections is somewhere over thirty now. As long as fools like me sign up and take their fancy pay, it’ll be manned ships for awhile. Ships like mine are serious arrays, not cheapo old probes.

The ship was just the kind of ungainly device that space allowed and atmospheres would shred. An array of radio dishes of varying sizes filing a circle a mile wide with the pilots wheel in the center, it could be piloted to any point on the fringes of the heliopause to meet up and network with any number of arraypods. It was mostly computer controlled, and only really required a crew of one. I had gone out on culls with larger crews, of maybe two or three others, when an astronomer wanted to make an observation or two. Sometimes grad students or pilots in training went with me, checking out what the outer reaches of the heliopause was like, and there was an endless line of technicians who regularly made adjustments and repairs to the arrays; they wanted to catch it in action, rather than just approach the thing back at a repair station with a toolbox and a list of complaints.

Pilots did a 3 week cull run before reinserting their array into the station’s master variable array, with anywhere from 2 days to a week per cull, followed by a week or two at an Oort base, compiling their data, assimilating repeated recordings into as solid and static free a master as possible, and writing reports based on ships logs and personal journals. I always tried to make my logs and journals as detailed as possible, so the after-reports were more cut-and-paste than anything else. The end result was a day or two of off-time at the Oort base, where I could read or play games in the rec area, and chill out before making an earthbound run. ISA didn't want pilots burning out on cull duty, so regulations had us rotate a cull with a run to earth and then a term of orbit duty to keep your inbound skills sharpened. After that, a few weeks vacation and some time doing exercise and tests at pilots’ camp before your next outbound run. Even with the fake gravity we get from the hamsterwheels on every ship, there is the ongoing concern for loss of bone mass and possible damage to your marrow. Earthbound runs took a little longer than current FAPS propulsion would allow, because you usually carried a load of supplies outbound and a load of trash inbound. We average about 2 cull-runs a year that way, maybe more if an increase in packages has been detected or orbit duty was locked up, as happened occasionally. Every 3rd year, you miss a cull run to hit pilot training again for a little refresher course.

My second run out I got a partial Package, mostly video only from the fifties, a bit of random bounce-back of some rock-n’-roll radio from some AM station in Minnesota, circa 1962, and what was unmistakably a Package of fresh stuff. I had heard similar stuff back at base. It was voice, they sang. Decoded, it was in five channels, like stereo but bigger and wider. Speculation ran rampant that they had five ears apiece or more than that but needed to simulate their complex stereotomy with five channels or that they assumed we had five ears because of our five fingers and five things sticking out of our torsos. Nobody had actually come up with the One Theory that beat all the others. On that run, I picked up one song, new to us, that clocked in at about seventeen minutes long, and the best part was it repeated for days, just that single recording. That was not uncommon; we were all sure they wanted us to hear their stuff, so it came in lumps, repeated and repeated, sometimes for days.

Their singing was simple, made up of a few dozen ‘words’. Words were called that because they were the least divisible audible sound, though we did not and still do not have any insights into their language. Their words were modulated hoots that sounded like someone with a cough and a bad smoking habit trying to imitate an owl; you could hear the moistness of their vocal orifice as its lips or edges or whatever slapped together. It repeated in a roundel style in different keys until it resolved, neatly and prettily, seventeen minutes later. They seemed to do everything in a time signature based on 3. Scientists, musicians, and mathematicians were quick to dissect their music as it came in, and there has already been a certain ‘established wisdom’ about what their music tells us. Their clicks and howls sound almost unmistakably organic; I hear the slapping together of their lips or whatever they have, but there is no scat singing equivalent, although it would be awfully hard to pick out if it were there. There hasn’t even been the sound of someone accidentally hitting the microphone, although they may have simply edited this out. We don’t know for sure how much of their art we are getting a glimpse of, or what process they are using to determine what gets sent, or who is doing the determining. I have heard the talks, attended the lectures, and read the articles and they hold a certain amount of weight, and some rather interesting, if academic, insights. Still, they lack a basic understanding that only a music fan would pick up on.

I am a music fan; I make runs because I am a pilot working in astronomy and in this part of the field I get to pilot a ship of my own. There is also the amazing and rare opportunity to hear music that no one has ever heard before. I have heard things that have not yet reached the rest of humanity; I have a jump on part of history ahead of all my fellow humans, save for my fellow pilots, and there are only a few dozen on cull duty at any given time. I have been the first human being to hear what is most likely world-famous before it has ever gotten here, albeit on another world. I have spent my life listening to Bach, Mozart, Gershwin, the Beatles, Hanafi, reggae, western jazz, parachorale. Music has been a part of my life since my parents gave me my first dataccount when I was 3; it came with a basic music appliance, shaped like JoustMouse, and I invariably had it on or at least nearby when I was playing. When I was 10, they upgraded my account from sidecar to my own, and I was given my own stereo and headset. I have spent my life since then balancing a love of music with all of the things one has to do to get by in the world. In between work and school and all of my other pursuits, music has found a way to seep in through the cracks. I sing in the shower, I warble along to the radio in my v-car, I go dancing to everything from dubhouse to scrunch to neo waltz. A typical fan, I have tried to familiarize myself with musical terms I probably have no business knowing, things geared towards musicians or audio engineers. It is the attempt of someone on the fringes to worm their way into a profession they are not in, if even through just the words, the terminology. I listen to this crazy music from the stars and I hear that it is soooo dry.

Signal processing. It is now part and parcel of our music. Even some of the purest recordings use some form of it. I saw a documentary once on a music archivist who travelled the Earth gathering folk songs. There was a shot of the recording gear he used. Pretty simple set of gear, a digital recording laptop with the usual suite of recording and editing software, and a set of about a dozen wireless microphones, the flat piezoelectric ones that are supposed to be so good. It wasn’t anything you couldn’t find in any music or computer shop. When they showed him recording, there was a pretty good shot of his screen. I zoomed in on the vid and saw he was using equalization to boost some frequencies and downplay others. He also had little foam windscreens over each of the mikes. What was supposed to be just a straight recording was filtered through some technology so it would sound better, or more natural. Interference is a given in our approach to recording. Not for them, it seems.

They used no reverb, no echo, no distortion, no weird EQ. Nothing was piped through resonance filters, no vocoding, no resynthesis or harmonic slaving, not even anything in the way of instruments. Their music was seemingly entirely separate from the means they used to record it. They played with sound as composition, but not with sound as a recording. They didn’t use their technology to have fun with their music. I have not heard anything that sounds obviously synthesized. An engineer friend of mine said that acoustic analysis of the way their recordings sounded showed that their microphones or equivalents were simply spaced equidistantly around their singers or speakers, whether there was a single speaker or a chorus. It implies a certain indifference to trickery, or perhaps it is an abhorrence to illusion. We’ve even heard wind blowing on some recordings.

I wrote a paper on this lack of audio signal processing, and it even got published in Extraterrestrial Studies Journal because, after all, I am a starship captain and I have added to the library of knowledge about extraterrestrials. My paper was given a backhanded compliment of bringing up good points for everyone to refute. " Food for thought," they sneered. Maybe they were just being nice to me when they published my paper. Some warped sense of professional courtesy intruding upon their science and speculation.

Sometimes the most unlikely things can be food for thought, including radio signals that have strained their way across the light years.
I took my job seriously. They drill it into you during training and briefing, and they weed out people inclined to racism or species bigotry. Every radio wave I caught on my array had the potential of being another thread in the bind between our two civilizations. I was not casual. I know I can sound that way, but it’s only a side effect of my being so used to it by now, as it is my profession. When the first song from the stars came, I wept. It truly moved me. There is not a day that goes by that our stellar chorale does not reawaken in me the very reasons I pursued this profession in the first place. They even sent me to the Vatican once, along with a whole batch of potential Captains, to attend an ecumenical conference on the religious and theological implications of voices from the stars. I did not think of any of our newfound music as boring. When the first song from the stars came, with strange voices slurring and slapping out a tune, in strange harmony no less, but sounding like they emanated from some strange bodily opening not like a mouth and not too dissimilar from a gurgling choke, I was far from flippant.

The first Package was just old radio shows, they lasted about two days, and then they repeated, for about seven months. There is always a corollary effect to big news stories; sometimes, if the story is big enough, it can spawn cottage industries. A hundred cottage industries sprang into being around old radio programs. The public domain was raided. Everyone wanted to know who would be next on the bounce-back express. For seven months, humanity revisited the Bickersons, Lights Out, Jack Benny, and a multitude of music and news shows. Where Arch Oboler had once been forgotten, his name was now known worldwide, and he was discussed at length. After the "seven month itch", our radio neighbors started sending us packages of their own material. They spoke, they sang, and they clapped. That’s pretty much it.

I was in high school when it happened, that first bounce-back of some random radio from the forties, and extrasolar astronomy already loomed as a cool job, especially as my father and uncle had been marines on the moon, and I grew up hearing about life in 1/6th G. There were many times as a child when my attention was directed upwards to the planets and the stars. My Mom and Dad, in one of my earliest memories, let me stay up late one night to look through Dad’s telescope and see the dim fuzzy image of a wheel in the sky; that was the Kepler Station on the night they lit it up for the first time. I still have a disc of the occasion, and I think that has reinforced that memory, being able to look at this ancient poor video. In junior high, my science class took a trip into orbit. For three hours, my classmates and I floated around and remained oblivious to our teachers’ observations. When I got into college, I worked a full time job just so I could save enough for a lunar vacation. I got it, too. Ten whole days and a pound of lunar soil to take home. Most exciting time of my life up to then. I studied piloting and navigating in grad school, even learned the major points of NAVNET programming to make my resume look better. I worked my ass off to get to the edge of the solar system, and I did it.

In my line of work, I have seen some amazing history being made. I worked on the ground team that sent Emissary Two on its way towards Sirius, filled with more instruments than any space probe before that, and with a great big antenna, too. I managed to intern on the Jupiter balloon project for a semester. I have felt in my heart the stirring that said I was in on something awesome and great and important.
Nothing prepared me for my first cull of my new run. Of all humanity, I was first to hear it, and yes I have double checked that with the planetbound listeners.
There is a particular tune from our stellar cousins in song that reoccurs every once in a while, done in a slightly different style occasionally. We have heard fast versions and slow, versions employing different kinds of harmony, and versions with their drum, which we used to believe was their only instrument. We in the International Signal Recording Institute, the culling corps, have nicknamed it "the folk song".

I was the first one to hear the dub version.
It began with their drum sound, which was a slapping noise with a waveform distinctly unlike their voices. One of my scientist friends has made a stir and a bit of his career on the notion that it is clapping, not drumming.
So the drum starts, and slaps away for 8 beats, then the singing starts. I assumed of course that I was coming in late on a broadcast, and would have to wait for a possible repeat, but I turned out to be wrong. After 8 beats, the drum started again, and I heard a distinct accent on every other beat, like it was being struck harder. We had not heard such dynamicism before, so my ears perked up immediately. Then the voices started, and stopped immediately, to be followed by a distinct echo of the first ‘word’, fading into nothing, while that beat kept going. Then I nearly screamed with joy and surprise and astonishment, and I pulled myself from my chair towards the computer’s monitor in front of me, because I heard a bass. A low plucked sound. A bass, and it picked out four different notes, then paused for four beats, then repeated. Then the voices started again, again with the echo, but they did not cut off this time, so the voices harmonized with themselves, echoing over a kick-slap beat and a bass something plucking out a melody, that was put through some sort of sound signal processing, and turned into dubby grooves. It went on for about nine minutes, then stopped and started all over again. I immediately sent the first cull back to Oort station 11 and also to HQ at Earth. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that we send things to our personal accounts back home, and sure enough I sent an encrypt to myself, just in case. I stayed on that signal for a full day and a half, and they beamed nothing at us on that frequency but their dub version of ‘the folk song’. It wasn’t long before I heard that they had sent out two more ships to cull on that frequency, and that 3 Oort stations had retuned themselves to pick it up, too. Our species had not only gotten the attention of another race, we had actually influenced their art. At the end of my 3 weeks, I returned to the station almost a hero, and was sent back to earth to give the press something to write about.

On my way back to Earth, I tuned into the BBC extra-T digital channel to hear the news. They mentioned my name several times, which made me smile (make the institute look good and you get a raise, and besides, it was exciting to be world famous), then the news program ended, to be replaced by a pop hits radio show. Halfway through the show, I was nearly ready to sleep, but then I heard it. It was sparsely produced, very dry, no echo , no reverb and consisted of just clapping and singing by a choir, based on one of the more dissected fugueish rounds that had been sent to us from the stars, with lyrics in English. I laughed so hard I floated right out of my chair.