Introduction to Waveform Palindrome Music
What is a palindrome?
A palindrome is anything that's the same backwards and forwards. "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!" and "Stack Cats" are both examples of word palindromes. Palindromes exist in other formats too. "1331", "77", and "185474581" are all number palindromes. Music palindromes come in a variety of shapes. Some music palindromes are palindromes simply in their arrangement. Part A of the music is followed by part B, which is followed by part A once more. Other musical palindromes are a bit more in depth in that the actual notes are the same backwards and forwards. "A#, B, B, G, B, B, A#" would be an example of a simple example of a short musical note palindrome. Finally, the type of musical palindrome discussed in this site is quite unique: Waveform Palindrome Music. In waveform-palindrome tracks, the actual waveform of the song is reversable. This means that if one were to play such a palindrome backwards it would be the same as if that person had played it forwards. If you want, you can head on over to the listening section right now.
For more on palindromes, click here for the extensive Wikipedia article.For a relatively exhaustive list of various word palindromes that have been discovered, try here.
For more on number palindromes, click here.
For more on music palindromes that have reversable notes, click here or here.
Why does does palindrome music sound like?
It sounds mostly like any other music, except it has the added quality of being reversable. All the waveform palindome music that I have composed so far is electronic music, but that's only because that's the sort of music that I'm most familiar with.
Can I write palindromic music?
Sure! It's actually really easy. It's much, much easier than you'd imagine. Of course, some prior, general knowledge about writing music is necessary, but besides that, all you need is a wave-editor (I recommend for any OS the free software Audacity) and a sequencer (if you use Linux, you can try the free software Rosegarden). But of course you'd need those things for writing any sort of music, so really waveform palindrome music requires nothing more to compose.
Anyway, I wrote a little tutorial on some of the techniques that I used and a few of potential iss that you might run into while writing waveform palindrome music. Just click here to get started.
What gave you the idea?
I don't really remember. I suppose it just occured to me that it would be cool to try writing waveform palindrome music, as palindromes always fascinate me.
Why do you use the pseudonym Mark Skram?
That shouldn't be too hard to figure out...
Why is there the ">--" at the top of this page and the "--!<" at the bottom of this page? Are those typos?
Nope! Those are not typos. They are there because the actual HTML code of every page in this website is a palindrome! Right click on this page and select "View Page Source" to see for yourself. As you can see, at the bottom is a reversed version of the code for this website. The ">--" and "--!<", when reversed, turn into the HTML code for comments, which makes your web-browser ignore the reversed version of this page. Otherwise, if I didn't have the ">--" and "--!<", it would try to render all of the reversed text, resulting in a big jumbled mess.
If you're wondering how I made the code for this website palindromic, here's how. This website is running Planet Mongo, which is a free content manager that I wrote and use in all of my websites. By changing several lines of code, I made it so that it will buffer all of the outputted text in a variable, and then, after it has finished rendering the website, it will output the reversed version of the buffered text.
Note: the observant might notice that there are a few return-characters at the beginning of the HTML code that aren't
properly mirrored at the bottom. That's actually because of some returns embedded somewhere outside of the
<?php and ?> tags. I could fix it, but it would be somewhat tedious. So, to be most
precise ignoring some whitespace, the HTML code is a palindrome.
Is this website updated with any regularity?
I first made this site several years ago, writing the Part 1 of the technique tutorial. I then got busy with other things and it ended up being left stagnated for those several years. Now, in 2007, I'm updating it, and am finishing the technique tutorial. However, I still haven't composed any palindromic music for quite a long time. That means that those seven tracks I have for download are actually quite old, composed when I was still almost exclusively into Drum n Bass. I have tried writing more palindromic music at more recent times, but nothing, as of yet, has panned out. Anyway, I do hope to get writing more waveform palindrome music. Really, it's probably the most original/interesting music I've composed, as everything else fits nicely into some genre or another (even if that genre is experimental). Sorry for the poor attention to updating this site. Remember, I do keep my blog reasonably well updated, so if I'm feeling distant, you can always contact me at my main website and nag me to post more waveform palindrome music.