Imagine Stars / Farewell, Auckland Physics – EP.
Available to stream everywhere in mid-June, this small release of music includes “Gravitation”, my graduation song, and “Imagine Stars”, the complete reinterpretation of a melody that has had a long history with my time as a physics student. This page says a bit more about the story behind each track.
Cover art
The cover image is a pendulum bob held up against my iPad, which displayed a Celestia render of the solar system. Some earlier Cover Image iterations follow.
I guess this general composition can trace all the way back to 2016/2017, where my first scrapbook showed up in my personal iTunes library. This would have been the initial cover art for “Gravitation” too. Of course, this version has been retrofitted with some modern IrPt elements.
01 – Five (Acoustic)
This is what the 2022 release could have been. My first experiment in polyrhythm. It was the first published Prime Series track. From some angles it was a love song, you be the judge.
Composed in June 2022.
02 – Imagine Stars
This track was inspired by the background music used in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUWTAyundrw, from a channel that no longer seems to be maintained.
It is an obscure video from an early build of Space Engine. Both came into my life at just the right time — I will never forget the first few minutes I spent with a build of Space Engine 0.97, looking for black holes in the Milky Way.
Anyway, efforts were made to contact the original creator. This version includes original melodic elements, entirely manually recreated and put in a distinct arrangement. Credit to the original creator for the inspiration.
Created in May 2024.
03 – Gravitation
A clearly 2016 experiment in electronic dance music. I first wrote this for that year’s end-of-year Science Scholars function, but I didn’t show it to many people until now.
It had its own cover image when I wanted to celebrate graduation with it.
Composed in October 2016. Drums were performed in October 2023.
04 – 4.83
This melody (assortment of random key presses) was first captured in Morrison Hall, Berkeley, during one of the few nights I spent with the piano before statistical mechanics assignments permanently dented my brain.
4.83 is the absolute magnitude of the sun, which is defined as the brightness of a star seen 10 parsecs (3 × 1017 m) away. It’s a distance still well within the galactic neighborhood. The sun’s warmth, glow, and gravitational pull slowly fading away, until it is no different from all the other stars … that is a view some distant descendants of humanity riding on a solar sail might one day enjoy. The great vastness.
Ahhhh.
Composed in February 2018.
Yourong Frank Wang 