This week I’ve been listening to the latest release by TCF (Lars Holdhus) on Liberation Technologies, entitled 415C47197F78E811FEEB7862288306EC4137FD4EC3DED8B. Like his previous releases, each track title looks like an MD5 checksum – a string of letters and numbers that encodes the digital fingerprint of a file. A description of the release on Bleep.com suggests that “there are hidden keys in the track’s titles that unlock the full meaning of the work”. I haven’t been able to decode those titles, but I did notice something unusual in the visualizations of the last track – ’97 EF 9C 12 87 06 57 D8 B3 2F 0B 11 21 C7 B2 97 77 91 26 48 27 0E 5D 74′. Playing in foobar2000 and using its spectrogram visualizer, some unusual shapes are visible in the mid to upper frequencies that look almost as if they are cut-out. Here’s a foobar2000 spectrogram of the whole of track 7, which is just 29 seconds long (click to enlarge):
The five vertical red/yellow features are a slowed-down voice saying the word ‘slow’, but what caught my attention was the pattern in the background – the dark blue shapes with sharp edges. I wondered whether TCF had used some kind of spectral manipulation tool that allowed for the frequencies to be cut up in this way – like SPEAR or FreqTweak, for example. Then it occurred to me to that the shapes are squished at the top because this is a spectrogram plotted on a logarithmic frequency scale. So I made another spectrogram on a linear frequency scale, using the free software Sonic Visualizer, and after a bit of tweaking this was the result (click to enlarge):
It’s rare to see an image so clearly in a spectrogram. It’s clear enough to be able to search for visually similar images online, which reveals that it’s a photograph of violence during political protests in Greece, 2011: http://www.themysteryworld.com/2011/08/greece-protest-photos.html
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