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Slime Mould Memory

from A Noise in the Dark by Noise Club

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about

Slime Mould Memory was inspired by the memristor. In 1971, Professor Leon Chua of the University of California proposed that there must be a fourth fundamental circuit element along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor, one that connects charge and magnetic flux. The memristor, as he called it, could remember its resistance, even when switched off. The element was finally created by a team at Hewlett-Packard’s laboratories in April 2008.

The importance of the memristor is not limited to electronics, however; it can also help explain how the brain works. In 2008, a team led by Tetsu Saisuga at Hokkaido University in Sapporo discovered that the single-celled slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, could not only sense and react to its environment, but could anticipate periodic events and even solve simple puzzles. “The Japanese paper rang a bell with Max Di Ventra, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego. He was one of the few who had followed Chua's work, and recognised that the slime mould was behaving like a memristive circuit. To prove his contention, he and his colleagues set about building a circuit that would, like the slime mould, learn and predict future signals.”

This research inspired me to write a piece based on the principles of memristivity. Noise Club had already been asked to produce two tracks for an Irish internet-based radio show called Found Sounds on Iúr FM, so I thought this would be an ideal opportunity. The brief was very free, even freer than the brief for Medusa Cascade: the tracks should not be ‘too long’ for radio.

Because I wanted to play around with the idea of memory in this piece, I decided to use just a single sound sample: a recording of me scraping a piezo contact mic I made across my desk. All recording, editing and sequencing was carried out be me.

The starting point was deciding the form, and what I wanted to achieve with it. I decided to use the connection between charge and magnetic flux as the basis of the form, splitting the piece more-or-less in two. The first section would represent charge, and the second magnetic flux. I also wanted to represent Physarum polycephalum’s ability to predict future signals, so decided this would be the organising principle within sections. The last strategic decision was more an artistic one than representative: I wanted to try and create a piece in which a highly intense build-up would peak into the sublime, which proved, ultimately, the biggest challenge of the piece, and took the longest time to get right.

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from A Noise in the Dark, released June 6, 2010
Composed by Simon Jones

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