I was constructing a digital optical printer for my friend Robert Polidori to use. One function I worked on was what I thought would be a simple frame duplication system for video files.

I used  a MAX/MSP/Jitter software tool to allow me to multiply video and corresponding audio “frames”, so that, for instance, something that had an original frame could be doubled to have two of every original frame.

So I could have a 1-second video clip of 30 frames per second copy into a 2-second video clip of 30 frames per second. Every single frame would be doubled. With video, no problem.

But the audio duplication gave an unexpected problem. I loaded the audio track into a buffer in RAM, which is addressable per sample–48000 per second. And II copied each sample, so that the new file will have two samples for every one in the original file.

The thing is… duplicating it had the result of cutting the perceivable playback frequency by half. 

The duplicated sample didn’t register as a change in audio. Instead, the duplication doubled the time that the initial sample was held, which cut the frequency in half. So the pitch actually dropped.

Remember that if a simple sine wave is played at 60 cycles per second, the speaker that plays it moves back and forth sixty times, making pressure waves in the air that match that back and forth frequency,

But this isn’t a full sample of a sound wave’s cycle. It is an audio sample of 1/48000 of a second, Essentially, the speaker cone doesn’t move. The cone won’t move until it has a new, different sample. 

The model this has for sensible time is striking to me. Following this model: a visual stimulus can have its duration extended without changing the nature of what is perceived. However, a sound stimulus is RELIANT on time to exist… sound is the registering of the differences of air pressure through time. If there is no change, there is no sound.

So our senses at once live in two temporal modes: the atemporal, where nothing changes, and the eotemporal, where there is sequence. Our awareness, our consciousness, is always positioning our self across these two. 

Thus: simultaneous opposites.