Shifting Meanings

Because the audio here is a binaural rendering of some messy multichannel stuff, headphones are strongly recommended.

This is a short piece made with a guitar and custom-synthesized sounds based on a feedback loop between a physical model and chaotic map. In terms of what it’s actually ABOUT though, here are the original show notes:

“I wrote the guitar part here in 2017-ish, about an area near where I grew up called the Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve. That’s what ‘PCR’ has always meant to me, but starting in 2020, another meaning for this acronym has slowly overtaken it. Polymerase Chain Reaction methods are a powerful tool for quickly diagnosing infectious diseases, and they’ve been widely used in COVID-19 tests. This new version of the song is inspired by that shift in meaning, and by how languages change over time in general.”

Enjoy!

Audio Tools:

An acoustic guitar, SuperCollider, and Python

Visual Tools:

A phone camera, Python, and a text editor