Pink Air

The Multiverse

I put an epsiode of "In Our Time" into Live's sampler so I could play the whole thing by pressing any key. The higher the key, the higher the pitch. (You know, sampling. Like all the young people do.) Then had Live play a somewhat random series of patterns while I varied where in the 45-minute interview each note started to play:

Download Multiverse.mov

If you think of the Y-dimension of the second row as the length of the interview with the beginning at the bottom and the end at the top, every note plays a snippet of the interview starting from where the black "timekeeping" line intersects the pink line. A perfectly flat pink line would signal a series of notes that all start within a very narrow band of the whole interview.

I'm moving the pink line around by moving the right end of the line. The left starting point is stable which is why the sound always seems to loop back toward that particular word which is the topic of the show and interesting input for a semi-random, sort of looping process.

God's stapler

Why are puns used so often as titles for books and articles? Even if I don't fully understand the reference being made or it doesn't really make sense, I still get a fairly consistent though vague feeling from this kind of wordplay, as if I'm already being prepared to believe what I'm about to read. Why should a pun generate preemptive credibility?

When I'm trying to condense the whiff of meaning around language into something more solid, I often play a game that Emily and I used to play as junior planners. We would replace all the words in an ad with nonsense syllables and read them out loud to hear just the tone, and often it's the tone that holds all the meaning. The words are just blank carrier waves. Here's a common tone structure for a conventional print ad in which you can hear the headline, body copy and tagline:

Download print_tone.mp3

When I play the tone of a title pun like "Animal Pharm", the NYT magazine exposé of "pill-popping pets", I hear the "Law and Order" chapter title sound.  The show's producers call it the "doink-doink", a seriously underpowered name for that heavy metal duo of syncopated thumps. I think of it as the sound of god's stapler, whacking up pieces of paper on the cosmic bulletin board. Eventually, the pieces will form a recognizable shape, a story, but right now you can't see it. And in the end, you may not like what the story says about the world and your fellow man. But the stapler doesn't care about how you'd like things to be. All you know is that the things you're about to see are undeniably true pieces of a puzzle, recorded, logged, tagged and doinked. There is a connection, a true and dramatically satisfying conclusion to which you will be inexorably drawn by logic, as long as you accept the truth of the pieces.

Good puns make unexpected connections. But even when they're not good, as titles they promise apodictic drama: "The linguistic connection exploited by this pun reveals and confirms a deep truth about the world". In other words, if there's a good pun to be made, it must be true. Kind of like the way scientists believe elegance to be a required quality of valid theory.

We sometimes use a similar method in planning. One of my planning mentors once told me that etymology is planning trick #1. Look up the derivation of a key word central to a brand and use that to come up with a deeper meaning you can communicate.  Of course, earlier meanings of a word or word family don't necessarily reveal much about what people mean when they use a word today.  But like a good pun, it sounds true.

How to make interesting things

1. Make a list of things you find interesting
2. Crossbreed

In this case: Gerhard Richter x Dawn of the Dead =

This pairing makes a lot of sense to me. I'm surprised Richter hasn't done it himself.

Planning engines

If you're anything like me, you may have sometimes wondered, "Why can't I just get a robot to do this planning work?". If you're even more like me, your co-workers have also asked this question. I haven't yet found a planning robot (and why isn't there software that can scan a document and enter snarky parenthetical asides at appropriate points like this?) but I have found a few engines, small devices that do a little bit of the mental lifting for me.

One of my first engines was the Nike Brief-O-Matic. It's a set of brand-relevant concepts (e.g. play, war, teamwork, injury) arranged in a 2x2 chart. Each cell represents the equation of two concepts (e.g. play is war, play is teamwork). That equation could then be the focus of a communications brief. It is a testament to the complex coherence of the Nike brand that so many of the cells immediately suggest recognizably Nike campaigns, both existing and potential. But you could also use such an engine to help develop a brand into something more interesting, something usefully coherent without being boringly consistent. A largely mechanical process like this one can throw up a ton of rich, generative, striking and unexpected possibilities within a bounded idea space.

And where did I get the original concepts? Many of them came from another engine, one of my favorites, the indispensable Lexical FreeNet. It's like a thesaurus on steroids, completely based on word relations as they exist on the Web. So again, "thoughtless" crashing together of data produce a lot of interesting noise. Try it out the next time you're struggling to find a new way to connect Product A with Brand Value B. Read the fascinating technical notes. Lexical FreeNet is an engine's engine: an interesting thing that makes more interesting things.

I'd be very interested in hearing of any planning engines you may have found or invented.